The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has openly vowed to pour $100 million into campaigns to defeat progressive representatives like Cori Bush who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Chris McGreal writes in The Guardian, “after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza… AIPAC pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support [Wesley] Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.” After Bush was unseated in August, she vowed to keep fighting for justice, and she put AIPAC on notice: “AIPAC,” she told supporters, “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with the former Congresswoman and key member of “The Squad” to discuss her re-election loss, the undue influence of organizations like AIPAC on our democracy, and Bush’s plan for fighting back.

Studio Production: Kayla Rivara, Rosette Sewali
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here at the Jewish Voice for Peace National Membership Meeting held in downtown Baltimore, and I am honored to be sitting here with Congresswoman Cori Bush, who just gave an incredible speech at the closing plenary.

Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining me. I know we only have a limited time here, and I wanted to just sort of ask, first and foremost, for our viewers out there who saw your re-election campaign be awarded by $8.5 million from AIPAC, amidst other things, what would you say to folks out there who just see the results of that election and think, oh, well, she lost fair in square. What’s really going on underneath that?

Cori Bush:

Well, thank you for the question. First of all, there was no fair. There was no square. There was deceit, manipulation, lies, misinformation, racism, bigotry, hatred, vitriol, and it was all okay. There was nothing that was off limits as long as AIPAC got the result that they wanted. They didn’t care about how it ripped apart our community, how all of the years of organizing, so much of it was just disrupted and some of those bonds that people created, it just completely shattered. They didn’t care about that. They don’t care about that. They don’t care that I’m the same person that some of those folks marched with out on the streets of Ferguson during the uprising in 2014 and 2015.

They don’t care that I am the one who protested the ending of the eviction moratorium in 2021 as a freshman out on the steps of the US Capitol to make sure that 11 million people weren’t about to be evicted from their homes when the government could have done something about it. They didn’t care about that. They wanted to discredit me because in discrediting someone that the people trust, then it pulls power not only from that person that they trust, but it pulls power from the people. So there over $8 million that they put in, plus those that they were working with, it roughly ended up being around $15 million, between 15 to $20 million, which is the numbers that we’ve seen. And I just want to make this point. To use racism against me, to distort my face on mailers to make me look like an animal, to use lies about my family or me. The thing is this, if you’re doing the right thing and you’re doing it for the right reason, why can’t you just use truth?

I have no problem with people running against each other. We’re able to do that. That’s how I won my race. I ran against someone I thought was ineffective. I felt like I could do more. I spoke about what I would do and how I felt I could do it. I spoke about my past and who I wanted to be as a member of Congress. The people believed it because the people saw me as that person, and I won around $1.4 million. It took me that much money to unseat a 20-year incumbent whose parent, whose father was in the seat for 32 years. So 52 years worth of a machine. I spent around $1.4 million to unseat. I won that race with over 4,700 votes. AIPAC and the groups that they were working with, they spent around 15 million. The person only won by less than 7,000 votes.

So it took basically 15 million … I mean, 15 times the amount of money to unseat me that it took me to unseat someone who had a 52-year family legacy. So that was the depth of the deceit that they had to use. And I’ll say this, never once did they say anything about Israel or Palestine. Never once did they use that in ads. Now in front of people, they would call me anti-Semitic. People would say, well, what did she do? Oh, well, [inaudible 00:04:41]. I have anything to show you. But what they would use in the ads was, oh, she’s mean to Joe Biden. She wants kids to drink contaminated water from lead pipes. Those were the things that they used against me. And because it flooded the media, our local media so heavily because of the amount of money, because you will see four or five ads from my opponent and then only one ad from me, the people started to believe and they were wondering, well, why does he have so much money? Well, why does it?

So that’s what it looked like, and that’s how they were able to deceive the community to make them think, oh, well, then maybe something is going on that we don’t understand. And then they also made people feel like, well, I’m confused, so maybe I’ll just stay home.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I want to ask another follow-up question on that because of course, you and other members of the squad are representative of a grassroots hope coming from a lot of the folks that we talk to and interview on a weekly basis. This is a hope over the past 10 years that there was still a possibility of making progressive change through electoral politics.

What would you say to folks right now who are feeling despondent and after seeing AIPAC still amidst all of that unseat, you unseat Jamal Bowman, the richest man in the world buying his way into our government right now? what would you say to folks who feel like we don’t have enough to take on their money?

Cori Bush:

Well, that’s what they want us to believe. They want us to fall into this place of just feeling overwhelmed, just believing the chaos. They want us to stop fighting. They want us to think that … Well, they want us to just live in this place of fatigue. That’s why they keep ramming this train our way. But we can’t allow that to happen because what they understand is it’s actually the people who have the power. That’s why they have to do so much and push so hard and spend so much money because they understand is that it’s really us who has the power. We just have to acknowledge it and understand it and figure out how to properly use our power to fight against this. And so yes, I was unseated Jamal Bowman was unseated, and I know that we know that they’re coming from more in 2026 and beyond.

But the thing is, the movement is never one person or never a few people. Yes, we were working for more progressive change, and that’s an issue right now. But the other part of that is we need our actual elected officials who claim to be progressive, to actually be that. We need them or stop saying that you are, because then you’re making people feel this way because they’re looking like, oh, these are our people, but what’s going on? Why aren’t they pushing? Why aren’t they fighting for this change? So we need people to be your authentic self in this moment because the people are falling away from the Democratic Party because they feel the hypocrisy. People are saying, I don’t understand why you’re not fighting hard enough. You said this man is a fascist. He’s a racist, he’s a white supremacist. He’s authoritarian, he’s a dictator. He’s all of these things. But you’re not meeting the moment. You’re not meeting the threat with the proper opposition to it.

But when they also see that some of these same folks who are supposed to be our “leaders” take money from groups like AIPAC who are primarily funded by Republicans who also endorse insurrectionist members of Congress or people who supported insurrectionists, at least we feel, then the people are like, well, why should I believe and trust in you? Also, if you are cool with allowing a genocide to happen on our watch in our lifetime with our tax dollars, if you are okay with that, then what is your red line? Because apparently, death and destruction of thousands of people, it’s not. So who are you? Is this the party of human rights and civil rights? Is this the party of equality and equity and peace? Is this that party? It is absolutely not if there is no no real opposition to what we’re seeing right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just a final question. When you lost your reelection and you gave this rousing kind of speech that you sort of brought back into your speech today, you told AIPAC, “I’m coming to tear down your kingdom.” I wanted to ask, just in closing here with the last minute, I’ve got you. What does that mean? What does that look like? And for folks out there watching who want to see that, who want this undue money and influence out of our politics, what is it going to take to tear down that kingdom?

Cori Bush:

So one thing I won’t do is give all the secrets away. So I can’t give all of the … but what I will say is part of it is this, part of it is being here with the people. So Jewish Voice for Peace has 100% been a supporter of mine. And this didn’t just start after October 7th. We’ve been working with folks with JVP for years. This is not anything new, and we’ll continue to do that work. But the fact that they continue to organize … other groups are organizing and calling out the name “AIPAC.” There are experts working on why there is this loophole that allows for AIPAC to do some of the lobbying they do. There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and I’m going to continue to do that work. But the stuff that is more forward-facing, I’m going to continue to organize.

I’m going to continue to make sure that people know. The PAC United Democracy Project is … We need people to understand the connection between them and AIPAC. So that’s where the money is going to flow from. It’s going to flow from UDP. We need people to know DMFI and know some of these other names, but we also need people to know that in your local community, there are PACs being formed that are basically a smaller AIPAC. And their whole purpose is to try to make people to be kind of ambiguous. And so you won’t know that this is who they are. It is just like, oh, it’s this group that has all of this money that’s coming against this elected official that’s speaking out against the genocide. But they have all of this money, and so it’s like maybe they’re good. We want people to know. So educating people around the country as well.

I’m not going to stop fighting because AIPAC came for me. The thing is this: AIPAC didn’t make me, so AIPAC can’t break me. AIPAC didn’t position me so they can deposition me. The thing is, I got there because the people put me there, but I was there for a purpose and a mission. So that’s the other part. So I knew while I was there in Congress that I was on a timer. I knew that I was only there for a purpose, for a mission. I knew that there was this urgency on the inside of me. One thing that I would say to people all the time is I felt this weeping. I just only inside of me, I just always felt like crying. It never stopped 24 hours a day. And it’s the thing that kept me moving fast. Like, okay, I got to do this. I got to do that.

People in Congress will say, “She’s championed all of these different areas. Why is she doing so much?” That was why I didn’t know that I would only be there four years, but I needed to get the work done, and I needed to be true to what I said, who I said I would be. But also, I needed to be what I needed. That’s what I had to be what I needed when I was unhoused, when I was hungry, when I was abused, and all of the things. I needed that. I needed what my grandmother needed when she taught me that you never look a white woman in her face because of what she went through the experience in Mississippi growing up and my ancestors before her through chattel slavery. I needed to be what they needed. And I’ll never stop doing that because the thing is, it’s not about me, it’s what is who God created me to be. And that’s just everything for me. And so I’m not afraid.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

Image by Koshu Kunii.

22 years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the US Department of State. I was the Deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq, March 19, 2003.

22 years later, I don’t regret my decision one bit.

President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

In 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.

 Instead, Bush was following the advisors who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.

The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearlman, Douglas Feith and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bush had already lied about the reason to send U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran.  But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.

I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001.  Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaida was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.   The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere…and it turned out to be in overthrowing Sadam Hussein in Iraq.

If I had one more resignation….no, two more resignations

One Resignation over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza

In the next twenty-two years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.

President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation…and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.

And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine that, including the 2014 right wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.

Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025

And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.

Four Presidential administrations after I resigned-Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump- another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a President: Project 2025.

While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisors, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.

The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants.  Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.

Trump is emboldened by the lack of Congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump “Elbows up!”

Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian president Zelensky in the White house in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.

While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real estate investor, Steve Witkoff did hammer out of much needed ceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the ceasefire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons.  As the ceasefire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”…. but without them.

And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as his henchmen to erase women, minorities, disabled and gender in his white, male, nationalist agenda seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.

So many issues…. and opportunities for resignation and resistance.

From Resignation to Resistance

I resigned two decades ago from criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.

Working with many, many organizations on the local (Hawaii Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait, Students and Faculty for Palestine, Hawaii For Palestine: Under the Olive Tree), national (CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Veterans For Peace,  Shut Down Drone Warfare) and international levels (International Peace Bureau, NO to NATO, No to War, World Beyond War, Women Cross DMZ, Pacific Peace Network, Ban Killer Drones) has given me outlets for protest and, very importantly, being with others who are deeply concerned about U.S. administration actions here in our own country and around the world.

You Must Resist

If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!

The post I Resigned Over the Bush War on Iraq … And Wish I Had More Resignations to Give! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ann Wright.

Twenty-two years later, I don’t regret my decision one bit.

President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

In 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, Bush was following the advisors who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.

The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearlman, Douglas Feith and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bush had already lied about the reason to send U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran.  But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.

I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001.  Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaida was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.   The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere…and it turned out to be in overthrowing Sadam Hussein in Iraq.

If I had one more resignation….no, two more resignations

One Resignation over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza

In the next twenty-two years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.

President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation…and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.

And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine that, including the 2014 right wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.

Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025

And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.

Four Presidential administrations after I resigned-Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump- another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a President: Project 2025.

While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisors, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.

The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants.  Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.

Trump is emboldened by the lack of Congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump “Elbows up!”

Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian president Zelensky in the White house in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.

While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real estate investor, Steve Witkoff did hammer out of much needed ceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the ceasefire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons.  As the ceasefire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”…. but without them.

And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as his henchmen to erase women, minorities, disabled and gender in his white, male, nationalist agenda seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.

So many issues…. and opportunities for resignation and resistance.

From Resignation to Resistance

I resigned two decades ago from criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.

Working with many, many organizations on the local (Hawaii Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait, Students and Faculty for Palestine, Hawaii For Palestine: Under the Olive Tree), national (CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Veterans For Peace,  Shut Down Drone Warfare) and international levels (International Peace Bureau, NO to NATO, No to War, World Beyond War, Women Cross DMZ, Pacific Peace Network, Ban Killer Drones) has given me outlets for protest and, very importantly, being with others who are deeply concerned about U.S. administration actions here in our own country and around the world.

You Must Resist

If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ann Wright.

Construction of the two carriers will begin “in the years ahead,” it said. “When complete, they will join the most capable, flexible, and professional Navy that has ever put to sea.”

The new carriers are part of a plan to boost American naval power.

The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carriers, all nuclear-powered, by far the largest fleet in the world. Rivals China and Russia have three and one, respectively.

With about 290 ships now, the U.S. Navy wants to expand the total fleet to 381 in coming years, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Biden Administration has not explicitly endorsed that 381-ship objective.

“When I personally delivered the news to Bill and George, they were deeply humbled,” said Biden in the statement. “Each knows first-hand the weight of the responsibilities that come with being commander-in-chief.”

Named after presidents

Most U.S. aircraft carriers are named after former presidents. Bill Clinton was the 42nd U.S. president, serving two terms from 1993 to 2001.

During his time in office, Clinton ordered a naval deployment to respond to the Third Taiwan crisis in 1996, as well as air strikes against Iraq in 1998 to degrade its capabilities to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

His successor, Bush, launched a global effort against terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to defeat what Washington considered “two of the world’s most brutal and aggressive regimes.”

There is already a carrier named after Bush’s father, George W.H. Bush, who was president from 1989-1992.

US aircraft carriers

The U.S. Navy regularly deploys two or three carriers in the Indo-Pacific amid rising regional tensions.

“Aircraft carriers are the centerpiece of America’s naval forces,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in response to the naming of the two carriers.

“They ensure that the United States can project power and deliver combat capability anytime, anywhere in defense of our democracy.”

A Congressional Research Service’s report on the Ford-class aircraft carrier program said that the scheduled deliveries of several shipbuilding programs would be delayed approximately 18 to 26 months.

Edited by Mike Firn and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

A quote, wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln, reads:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Well, that may be true but what is also true is that you can fool most of the people (followers of politicians, political parties, religions, celebrities, stars, social media influencers, businesspersons, and so on) most of the time because followers place blind trust in their heroes, heroines, religious leaders, influencers, etc.

This was visible during the quadrennial spectacles called Republican National Convention (July 15 to July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and Democratic National Convention (August 19 to August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois).

Of course, there is a difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party: the Republicans are overtly hostile and will screw you unashamedly in broad day light without any kind of lubrication or apology.

The Democrats are, in that respect, a bit less rough. They’ll beg your pardon; would plead with you to understand the criticality of the situation; but will screw you, nonetheless — of course, in a dim light with a bit of lubricant.

Both the conventions took place during the ongoing Israeli slaughter, displacements, starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza since October 12, 2023. Both parties have supported the Israeli carnage. There is a division in the Democratic Party about supporting Israel, but the strong voices are few and many a times become victims of the Israel Lobby. One of the powerful group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has spent more than $100 million in the 2024 election campaign: $15 million was spent to defeat US House Representatives Jamal Bowman who was critical of Israeli genocide of Gazans and $9 million to oust Cori Bush, another critic of Israeli war.

Danaka Katovich, National Co-Director CodePink, describes how a woman outside the convention center calling out the names of the children killed in Gaza was ignored and laughed at.

“There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.

“Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.”

Things were not too different inside the convention center, either.

The DNC allowed the parents of one of the hostages held by Hamas to speak and highlight their plight but no Palestinian was permitted to talk about the killing of over 41,000 [1] Palestinians (33% of them children and 18.4% women) and about ceasefire. Even a speech which included support for Kamala Harris was disallowed.

The speakers who did talk about Gaza and Palestine knew very well that their speeches were not going to make any difference.

AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez):

“She [Vice President Kamala Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”

After five and a half years in the US Congress and as an active member of the Democratic Party, progressive AOC [2] knows damn well that no efforts on part of Kamala or Biden administration is needed to secure a ceasefire — the US just has to stop money and arms flow to Israel and that’s it.

On August 21, AOC posted on X:

“Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment. To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.

Bernie Sanders:

“We must end this horrific war in Gaza. Bring home the hostages and demand an immediate ceasefire.”

Two progressive members devoted a total of 31 words to the more than 10 month old continuing tragedy without mentioning the over 41,000 Palestinians killed!

Senator Raphael Warnock (Georgia) talked about children’s (including Gaza’s) safety.

“I need all of my neighbors’ children to be okay — poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children in Appalachia.” “I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine. I need American children on both sides of the tracks to be OK. Because we are all God’s children.”

The speakers, including (Barack Obama), touched on various topics, but as Lorraine Ali in Los Angeles Times observed,

“But little was said about Gaza or Israel, and the silence spoke volumes. Let’s talk about everything but that war.”

When hawkish Harris opened her mouth she roared about defending the security of the most powerful and technologically advanced country, Israel, against the broken Palestinians.

“With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock because now is the time to get a hostage deal and cease-fire done.

“Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on Oct. 7.

“Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again.

“The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that – Israel is secure – the hostages are released – the suffering in Gaza ends – and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity.”

Hamas of the Israeli occupied Gaza is a “terrorist organization” but there is no mention of who caused the loss of “so many innocent lives” or who is making “desperate, hungry people” flee for “safety, over and over again.”
No mention of Israel. This, from one who is the would-be next President of the US.

She said she and Biden are “working around the clock.” The clock must be out of order. The war will only stop when the US decides to halt its support.

Back in July, Netanyahu addressed the US Congress. Many Democrats abstained, Harris included. But then the very next day, she met Netanyahu in private. Her facial expressions didn’t show she was angry in any manner. Now look at Obama’s picture with Netanyahu where Obama’s displeasure is visible. Netanyahu was trying to undermine Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

The statement by Harris after her meeting with Netanyahu was the same diplomatic bullshit. [3]

The conventions are basically a feel good exercise to create excitement and hope among supporters and to denigrate and make fun of the opposition. The Democrats did exactly that; made fun of former president and the current Republican Party presidential candidate, Donald Trump and frightened, rightly so, their followers/die hard supporters with fascism replacing “democracy” if Trump gets reelected.

The Democrats, however, didn’t remind their supporters that they (the Democrats), when in power, do act in a fascist manner overseas with their wars, sanctions, embargoes, blockades, seizing money and gold belonging to countries they don’t like.

On domestic issues the Democrats and Republicans differ on certain issues but both support capitalism and get plenty of money from the corporations. The hands of both parties are drenched with blood of foreigners, including children and women. Even within the US, the Democrats are cruel with many segments of the society. Republicans are openly cruel.

Notes

[1] After every Israeli deadly crime, the usual statement, actually a warning, from its major supporter, the United States, is,

“We are engaged in intense diplomacy pretty much around the clock, with a very simple message: All parties must refrain from escalation.”

That is, Israel’s murderous act should remain unpunished or else we’ll jump in to defend Israel. The above warning was for Iran to refrain from any retaliation against Israel which had assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also ordered killing of Lebanese militia group Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr.

[2] The Democratic leadership was using one of their presidents’ tactic by inviting AOC to speak and thus mainstreaming her but also blunting her voice. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 – 1973) said the following about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

[3] A couple of paragraphs from Harris’ statement;

“I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.  And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.  We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.  And I will not be silent.”

Lip service completed, let the one-sided hostilities continue …

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

As voters in several states cast their ballots in primary elections Tuesday, we look at one of the most high-profile races between Missouri Congressmember Cori Bush and St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell, who is challenging her for the Democratic nomination. Bush, a member of the progressive “Squad,” is one of the most outspoken advocates for Palestine in Congress, and the powerful pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC has poured over $8 million into the race in an effort to defeat her. “It’s all meant to push out someone who stands up for Palestinian rights,” says Michael Berg, a Bush supporter, whose recent essay in The Nation is titled “I’m a St. Louis Jew. Here’s Why I’m Backing Cori Bush.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Two widows and their children were among other Papua New Guinean squatters who had to dismantle their homes as the eviction exercise started at portion 2157 at Nine-Mile’s Bush Wara this week.

Agnes Kamak, 52, from Jiwaka’s South Waghi, and Jen Emeke, from Enga’s Wapenamanda, said they had lived and raised their children in the area for the past 10 years since the death of their husbands.

Kamak, who was employed as a cleaner with the Health Department, said she did not know where her family would go to seek refuge and rebuild their lives after they were evicted on Thursday.

• READ MORE: Other PNG eviction reports

“My two sons, daughter and I slept in the open last night [Wednesday] after we dismantled our home because we did not want the earthmoving machines to destroy our housing materials today [Thursday],” she said.

Kamak said she saved the money while working as a cleaner in various companies and bought a piece of land for K10,000 (NZ$4200) in 2013 from a man claiming to be from Koiari and a customary landowner.

“My late husband and I bought this piece of land with the little savings I earned as a cleaner,” she said.

“My second son is currently doing Grade 12 at Gerehu Secondary School and I do not want this situation to disrupt his studies.”

12 years in Bush Wara
She said she could not bring her family back home to Jiwaka as she had lived and built her life in Bush Wara for almost 12 years.

Emeke, who also worked as a cleaner, said she bought the piece of land for K10,000 and has lived with her two children in the area since 2016.

“After my husband passed away, my two children and I moved here and build our home,” Emeke said.

On March 12, the National Court granted leave to Nambawan Super Limited (NSL) to issue writs of possession to all illegal settlers residing within portions 2156, 2157 and 2159 at 9-Mile’s Bush Wara.

At the same time, it granted a 120-day grace period for the settlers to voluntarily vacate the land portions.

Most squatters had moved out during the 120-day grace period granted by the National Court for the settlers to voluntarily vacate the land.

The National witnessed the remaining squatters voluntarily pulling down the remaining structures of their homes and properties as earthmoving machines started clearing the area yesterday.

5400 squatters
It is understood that a survey conducted two years ago revealed that the total population squatting on the NSL land was about 5400 with 900 houses.

Acting commander of NCD and Central Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Peter Guinness said he was pleased with both the police and squatters who worked together to see that the first day of eviction went smoothly.

He said there was no confrontation and the first day of eviction was carried out peacefully.

Assistant Commissioner Guinness said settlers who were still removing their properties were given time to do so while the machines moved to other locations.

“I want to thank my police officers and also the sheriff officers for a well-coordinated awareness programme that led to a peaceful first day of eviction.

“The public must understand that police presence on-site during the awareness and actual eviction was to execute the court order now in place.

“We have families there, too, but we have no choice but to execute our mandated duties.

“The 120-day grace period was enough time for everyone to move out as per the court order,” Guinness said.

Awareness for the eviction exercise started three years ago.

Kelvin Joe and Gynnie Kero are reporters for PNG’s The National. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist, and Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent

As women and children seek hope of a future without tribal fighting, the cycle of killing continues in Papua New Guinea’s remote Highlands.

Tribal warfare dating back generations is being said to show no signs of easing and considered a complicated issue due to PNG’s complex colonial history.

Following the recent massacre of more than 70 people, community leaders in Wabag held mediation talks in an effort to draw up a permanent solution on Tuesday, with formal peace negotiations set down for yesterday between the warring factions.

• READ MORE: Other tribal warfare reports

A woman, who walked 20 hours on foot with seven children to flee the violence in the remote highlands, was at the meeting and told RNZ Pacific she wants the fighting to stop so she can return home.

In 2019, the then police minister said killings of more than two dozen women and children “changed everything”.

But a tribesman, who has asked to remain anonymous, told RNZ Pacific the only thing that had changed was it was easier to get guns.

Multiple sources have told RNZ Pacific the government appears to be powerless in such remote areas, saying police and security forces are sent in by the government when conflict breaks out, there is a temporary pause to the fighting, then the forces leave, and the fighting starts again.

There are also concerns about a lack of political will at the national level to enforce the law using police and military due to tribal and political allegiances of local MPs, as recommendations made decades ago by former PNG Defence Force commander Major-General Jerry Singirok are yet to be fully implemented.

While the government, police and community groups look at peaceful solutions, mercenaries are collecting munitions for the next retaliatory fight, multiple sources on the ground, including a mercenary, told us.

Killing pays
After “Bloody Sunday”, which left dozens dead in revenge killings, the men with guns were out of bullets.

Tribal fighting in Papua New Gunea’s Enga Province reached boiling point on February 18, fuelled by a long-standing feud between different clans, which resulted in a mass massacre.

The tribesman who spoke to RNZ Pacific said they did not want to fight anymore but believed there was no other option when someone from the “enemy” turned up on their land wanting to burn down their village.

“Prime Minister [James Marape] — we want development in our villages,” he said, speaking from a remote area in the Highlands after his village was burnt to the ground.

There is no employment, no infrastructure, no support, he said, adding that those were the things that would keep people busy and away from engaging in tribal conflict.

At the moment killing people paid, he said.

‘Hundreds of lives lost’
“Businessmen, leaders and educated elites are supplying guns, bullets and financing the engagement of gunmen,” Wapenamanda Open MP Miki Kaeok said.

The MP is worried about the influence of money and guns, saying they have taken over people’s lives especially with the increase in engagement of local mercenaries and availability of military issued firearms.

“Hundreds of lives have been lost. Properties worth millions of kina have been ransacked and destroyed. I don’t want this to continue. It must stop now,” Kaeok pleaded.

Meanwhile, men in the Highlands are paid anything between K3000 (NZ$1300) to K10,000 (NZ$4,400) to kill, the tribesman claimed during the interview.

Then, he called over one of the men involved in that fight, an alleged killer, to join the video interview.

“Um this is the hire man,” he introduced him. “If they put K2000 (NZ$880) for him and say go burn down this village — he goes in groups — they clear the village, they give him money and he goes to his village . . . ”

The “hire man”, standing slouched over holding a machete, looked at the camera and claimed 64 people were killed on one side and eight on another pushing the total death toll to more than 70.

Wabag police told RNZ Pacific on Tuesday that 63 bodies had been recovered so far.

“A lot of people died,” an inspector from Wabag told RNZ Pacific.

The killings have not stopped there; a video has been circulating on social media platforms of what appears to be a young boy pleading for his life before he was killed.

The video, seen by RNZ Pacific, shows the child being hit by a machete until he falls to the ground.

The man who allegedly carried out the brutality was introduced to RNZ Pacific by the tribesman via video chat.

“They recognise that this person was an enemy,” the tribesman — translating for the killer, who was standing in a line with other men holding machetes — told RNZ Pacific.

“This small guy (referring to the dead child) came out of the bush to save his life. But he ended up in the hands of enemies.

“And then they chopped him with a bush knife and he was dead.”

“In revenge, he killed that small boy” because the killer’s three family members were killed about five months ago.

Asked whether they were saddened that children have died in the violence, the killer said: “No one can spare their lives because he was included in the fight and he’s coming as a warrior in order to kill people,” our source translated.

Killing people — “that’s the only way”, they said.

He said that while fighting had been going on most of his life, military style weapons had only been in the mix for the last decade or so.

He said getting a gun was relatively easy and all they had to do was wait in the bush for five days near the border with Indonesia.

“We are using high-powered rifle guns that we are getting exported from West Papuans.”

He added the change from tribe-on-tribe to clan-to-clan fighting has exacerbated the issue, with a larger number of people involved in any one incident.

Mediation underway
A Wapenamanda community leader in Enga Province Aquila Kunza said mediation was underway between the warring factions in the remote Highlands to prevent further violence.

“The policemen are facilitating and meditating the peace mediation and they are listening,” Kunza said.

Revenge killings had been ongoing for years and there was no sign of gunmen stopping anytime soon, Kunza said.

“This fight has lasted about four years now and I know it will continue. It occurs intermittently, it comes and goes,” he said.

“When there’s somebody around (such as the military), they go into hiding, when the army is gone because the government cannot support them anymore, the fighting erupts again.”

Kunza has been housing women and children who fled the violence and after years of violence and watching police come and go, he is calling for a community-led approach.

At a large community gathering in Wabag the main town of Enga on Tuesday people voiced their concerns.

“The government must be prepared to give money to every family [impacted] and assist them to resettle back to their villages to make new gardens to build new houses,” Kunza said.

He said formal peace negotiations are taking place today as residents from across the Enga Province are travelling to Wabag today for peace talks between the warring factions.

‘Value life’
Many Engans have lamented that the traditional rules of war have been ignored as children have not been spared in the conflict and societal norms that governed their society have been broken.

A woman who was kidnapped last year in Hela in the Bosavi region — a different area to where the recent massacre took place — and held for ransom said PNG was on the verge of being a failed state.

“I’ve gone through this,” Cathy Alex told RNZ Pacific.

“People told us who gave them their guns in Hela, people told us who supplied them munitions. People told us the solutions. People told us why tribal fights started, why violence is happening,” Alex shared.

She said they managed to find out that killers got paid K2000 (NZ$880) for killing one person, that was in 2017.

“For a property that’s worth K200/300,000 [up to NZ$130,000] that’s destroyed, the full amount goes to the person who caused the tribal fight,” she said.

“How can you not value the life of a person?”

Government help
With retaliations continuing the “hire man” who claims to have killed more than 20 people from warring tribes, said he is staring down death.

“He would have to die on his land because…when they come they will fight…we have to shoot in order to protect my village,” the tribesman explained.

“He said he’s not scared about it. He is not afraid of dying. He got a gun in order to shoot, they shoot him, and that’s finished.”

“He’s really worried about his village not to burn down.”

The tribesman said that without government committing financial support for infrastructure, jobs and community initiatives the fighting will continue.

He also wants to see a drastic change in police numbers and a more permanent military presence on the ground.

“We don’t have a proper government to protect us from enemies in order to protect ourselves, our houses . . . and to protect assets we have to buy guns in order to protect them.”

Parliament urged to act
Last week, the PNG Parliament discussed the issue of gun violence.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird, who is on the opposition benches, has called on the government “to respond”.

He said the “terrorists in the upper Highlands” needed their guns to be stripped from them.

“We are a government for goodness sake — let’s act like one,” Bird said.

Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso agreed with Bird’s sentiments and acknowledged that the situation was serious.

He called on the whole of Parliament to unite to fix the issue together.

RNZ Pacific has contacted the PM Marape’s office for comment with no response yet.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

U.S. soldiers from Bravo Company break down the door of a civilian Iraqi home in order to search the building in Baghdad on Oct. 31, 2005.

You may not know that there’s a memorial planned for the global war on terror. This would be understandable, since the global war on terror is like a toy that America was obsessed with for a short period of time and then grew tired of and has forgotten under the bed. To extend the metaphor, this would be the type of toy that continuously explodes and has killed millions of people.

President Donald Trump signed legislation approving the memorial back in 2017. The bill created an exception to the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which requires the passage of at least 10 years after the official end of a war before a memorial to it can be constructed in Washington, D.C. That was obviously unworkable regarding the global war on terror, which is tentatively scheduled to conclude five billion years from now when the sun expands and engulfs the Earth.

There’s no design yet, but the foundation funding the memorial is conducting a public survey for ideas now through October 17. It includes questions such as:

Screenshot of a question from the survey created by the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation.

You’ll note that none of the options are such emotions as “rage-filled sorrow” or “the urge to prosecute war criminals.” Given this, you may not be surprised to learn that the honorary chair of the foundation is George W. Bush, who happens to be the president who birthed the global war on terror with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The foundation’s funders include 7-Eleven, Amazon, and Baker Botts, a powerhouse Texas law firm named after James Baker, secretary of state for the first George Bush.

However, one of the survey’s final questions is, “Do you have any comments or additional notes for the GWOT Memorial Foundation to consider?” This is a great opportunity to submit some suggestions for the foundation to ignore.

A recent estimate by the Costs of War project at Brown University found that over 4.5 million people have died thanks to the direct and indirect effects of conflict in post-9/11 war zones. Of these, about 10,000, or 0.22 percent, are Americans (including those who died on September 11, 2001, or during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars). 

The global war on terror memorial will be located on the National Mall near the memorial to the Vietnam War, which lists the names of over 58,000 American dead. It might be nice to do the same kind of thing here but include the names of everyone from every country who died thanks to the global war on terror. This would require a monument about 75 times bigger than the one for Vietnam.

The downside of this idea is that it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. It’s true it’s not literally impossible, but it’s more likely that we will change the U.S. national bird from the bald eagle to the rose-breasted grosbeak, which is sexually nonbinary.

The Costs of War project has also calculated that the price of the global war on terror has been about $6 trillion so far, and we’ll have to spend another $2 trillion on care for veterans in the future, for an eventual total of $8 trillion. This sounds like a lot, but consider that it is only one one-millionth of $8 quintillion.

Some of this money was essentially set on fire and has disappeared. But a lot of it is still here in the U.S., in particular in the lovely suburbs surrounding the Defense Department in northern Virginia. Since the global war on terror memorial is going to be right by Arlington Memorial Bridge, there could be complementary bus trips across the Potomac, allowing visitors to gape at all the mansions, $180,000 Range Rovers, and, more recently, luxury pickleball courts they purchased for defense contractors. (From a distance, obviously — any regular people who get too close will experience an immediate armed response.)

Remember when George W. Bush’s CIA briefers gave him a presentation on August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”? And part of it warned that the FBI had information that “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings”? And other warnings his administration received were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks”? And how Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA whether Al Qaeda might be pretending to be about to attack America just to fool us into expending resources in response?

I hope you do remember this, because the way this didn’t matter in U.S. politics makes me feel as though I am experiencing the Mandela effect, a name for a phenomenon in which people have specific false memories. For instance, lots of Americans apparently believe the comedian Sinbad starred in a movie called “Shazaam” in the 1990s. I don’t remember that, but I definitely do remember Bush and Co. being criminally incompetent.

In any case, if all this did happen, it seems like the kind of thing we might want to highlight at a memorial about the ensuing worldwide war. But I don’t think the memorial’s honorary chair is really up for that.

Back in 2004, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Bush joshed about looking for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office, since they hadn’t turned up anywhere else. This was funny because his WMD claims were the basis for his invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

At the same event six years later, in 2010, President Barack Obama kidded about killing the Jonas Brothers with a Predator drone. Again, the joke here is that Obama murdered American citizens with drones and, according to a 2013 book, told aides that “I’m really good at killing people.”

Maybe these two videos could play continuously at the global war on terror memorial so everyone will realize there’s no reason we can’t have some fun with this whole thing. Let’s reach under the bed, grab this old toy, and build a memorial that shows our kids how we did pointless ultraviolence back in the day.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

No words for emotions — alexithymia

New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

“Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

“I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

“Little children working,” the visitor replied.

Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

[Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

“Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia-2/feed/ 0 412092 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-crimes-and-dangers-of-elliott-abrams/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-crimes-and-dangers-of-elliott-abrams/#respond Sat, 15 Jul 2023 17:36:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142176 It was a bright sunny March morning in 1980. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart. He stumbled and fell to the ground, dead.

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses G-d’s preference for the poor and oppressed. His visibility as archbishop elevated his voice and the credibility of his critique of the conditions faced by peasants in El Salvador.

A month before his assassination, Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter requesting a halt to U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government.

Over 250,000 people attended Romero’s funeral demonstrating the love of the Salvadoran people and echoing his demands for justice. Tragically, however, they were swimming against a historical current of meddling and manipulation which included murder, often orchestrated or at the very least condoned from the U.S.

Intentionally ignoring two U.S. embassy cables naming the general who ordered his personal bodyguard to carry out the assassination of Romero, in 1982, Elliot Abrams, the newly appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, said, “anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool.” Thanks to Abrams and his ilk’s support, U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran regime was dramatically increased that year. The following year, the U.S. gifted the Salvadoran military and government with U.S. advisors.

Last week, President Biden nominated Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s pick to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Elliot Abrams. If you’re not already outraged and infuriated, keep reading.

Under Abrams’ watch, over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, 75,000 Salvadorians were killed. In the village of El Mozote, the army’s Atlácatl Battalion herded women and children into a church convent and opened fire with U.S.-supplied M-16 automatic rifles before burning the building down. One hundred and forty children, average age six, were killed. In 1994, with blood still dripping from his hands, Abrams referred to the U.S.’s record on El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement.”

In addition to supporting the Salvadorian junta, Abrams was a defender of the Guatemalan Montt regime which oversaw the mass murder, rape, and torture of scores of Indigenous Ixil Mayan people in the 1980s. The Montt regime was so brutal that it was later classified by the United Nations as genocidal. From his conviction for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair, to his roles supporting the Iraq war, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, and attempting to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela as recently as 2019, one thing is clear: Abrams doesn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body.

Abrams epitomizes an extreme form of American biblical nationalism, dressed in the distortions of Christianity and Judaism that ironically echo the papal bulls of 1452. These papal decrees, known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” codify the rights of white nations to acquire and dominate any lands they “discovered.” Similarly, Abrams speaks the language of the Global North proclaiming that their hegemony is the natural order of the world, as G-d wills it to be.

The Doctrine of Discovery inspired the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the “right” to exploit and plunder Latin America to be exclusive to the U.S. “We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety,” President James Monroe said. This served as a philosophical justification for the ideological boots Abram’s wore to stomp all over Latin America, the Middle East and other places. Abrams has left bloody footprints across the globe.

Originally published in Waging Nonviolence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ariel Gold and Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-crimes-and-dangers-of-elliott-abrams/feed/ 0 412079 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/bidens-restrictions-on-oil-drilling-have-pushed-prices-up-to-where-they-were-in-the-bush-administration/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/bidens-restrictions-on-oil-drilling-have-pushed-prices-up-to-where-they-were-in-the-bush-administration/#respond Mon, 19 Jun 2023 05:37:48 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=286402 June 19, 2023 by Dean Baker

For better or worse (worse in my view), President Biden has not done much to restrict drilling for new oil and gas. As a result, we are now producing more than when Donald Trump was in the White House. Nonetheless, there are still many people who want to blame Biden’s restrictions for the high price of oil.

Well, none of these claims make any sense. Biden has not done much to restrict the price of oil, we are producing more oil now than under Trump, and oil is not expensive. To see the last point, I adjusted the price of oil (West Texas Intermediate) for the inflation we have seen since 2000, using the GDP deflator.[1]

As can be seen, oil prices were somewhat lower at times in the last twenty-three years. They were lower at the start of the George W. Bush administration, but higher through most of his second term. The plunged in the Great Recession, but then were higher than the current level through the rest of President Obama’s first term.

Oil prices then fell sharply towards the end of the Obama administration, as a flood of fracked oil came on line. Oil prices then rise under Trump, passing the current level in 2018 and then falling again in 2019. Oil prices plunged with the pandemic shutdown, but then soared with the reopening and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

They have now fallen back to a level that is below where they have been for most of the first two decades of this century. In spite of the widespread whining of Republican politicians about high oil prices, they are actually lower now than in most of the period that George W. Bush was in the White House.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/bidens-restrictions-on-oil-drilling-have-pushed-prices-up-to-where-they-were-in-the-bush-administration/feed/ 0 404997 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/rep-cori-bush-introduces-resolution-urging-congress-to-provide-reparations-for-enslavementshorts/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/rep-cori-bush-introduces-resolution-urging-congress-to-provide-reparations-for-enslavementshorts/#respond Mon, 22 May 2023 15:38:01 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=1cc3ff37b72efd51b6de17902f8f5513
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/rep-cori-bush-introduces-resolution-urging-congress-to-provide-reparations-for-enslavementshorts/feed/ 0 396759 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/drawings-by-guantanamo-forever-prisoner-abu-zubaydah-expose-details-of-us-torture/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/drawings-by-guantanamo-forever-prisoner-abu-zubaydah-expose-details-of-us-torture/#respond Thu, 11 May 2023 20:44:02 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/abu-zubaydah-drawings

A report published this week featuring previously unreleased drawings by Abu Zubaydah—a 52-year-old Saudi who has been imprisoned by the United States for more than 20 years at CIA "black sites" and Guantánamo Bay—offers new insight into torture suffered by a man caught up in a case of mistaken identity.

The report—entitled American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo—is based on sketches and descriptions by Zubaydah and other War on Terror torture victims and was led by Seton Hall University law professor Mark Denbeaux and University of California, San Francisco psychiatry professor Jess Ghannam, with the help of Seton Hall law students.

"Despite the efforts of the federal government, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, to conceal evidence of the actual operation of the 'enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) deployed on detainees in dark sites and at Guantánamo, a steady drumbeat of disclosures has provided an unparalleled view into this disgraceful episode in the nation's history," the report states.

"Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people."

The report notes that Zubaydah's drawings "viscerally convey the brutal reality the CIA sought to hide with its calculated destruction of video recordings of torture conducted by its agents," and "dovetail with the recent accounts of Dr. James Mitchell, a chief architect of the torture regime, who both wrote a book on EITs and testified in hearings on Guantánamo."

"These sources, together with the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, provide the most complete—and compelling—account to date of America's torture program" in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the publication states.

\u201c\ud83d\udc40 Previously unseen drawings show the various torture methods used by the CIA against Abu Zubaydah, including physical/sexual assault, waterboarding, and more. \n\nContrary to their claims, the report details how the FBI was complicit in his and other detainees' torture.\u201d

— CAGE (@CAGE) 1683816713

Born in Saudi Arabia, Zubaydah moved to the West Bank in Israeli-occupied Palestine as a teenager. He was captured by CIA, FBI, and Pakistani intelligence agents in Pakistan in late March 2002. Shot in the thigh, testicle, and stomach during the raid that led to his capture, Zubaydah—who was mistaken for a high-ranking al-Qaeda member—was transferred to CIA "black sites" in Pakistan, Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Northern Africa, and Diego Garcia. In September 2006, he was sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he remains imprisoned.

Zubaydah was the first so-called "high-value" detainee to be tortured by U.S. agents, who treated him as a human guinea pig.

"Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people," Denbeaux told The Guardian, which on Thursday posted the report along with an article by Ed Pilkington on Zubaydah's experience.

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet gave the green light for U.S. agents to torture Zubaydah—even after learning that the prisoner was cooperative. During one discussion on the matter, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly remarked: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

\u201cImagine: 21 yrs without trial in #CIA black sites and #Guantanamo; entire medieval torture program created to \u201cbreak\u201d him but they found no #AlQaeda link & no #9/11 prior knowledge. In fact, he\u2019s compensated by 3 EU nations for facilitating CIA torture 1/ https://t.co/8KhD6nPX2m\u201d

— Moazzam Begg (@Moazzam Begg) 1683807758

Zubaydah was subjected to the interrupted drowning technique known as "waterboarding" 83 times; rape under the pretext of "rectal feeding"; shackling in excruciating "stress positions"; sleep, sensory, and food deprivation; confinement in small boxes; exposure to extreme temperatures and loud music; death threats; beatings and being slammed into walls; sexual and religious humiliation; and other abuses.

Most of the torture techniques approved by the George W. Bush administration—which included waterboarding, deprivation, stress positions, the use of loud music and dogs, slamming into walls, solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures—are illegal under both domestic and international law.

In addition to these approved EITs, U.S. military and intelligence personnel subjected terrorism detainees—many of them innocent men, women, and children—to additional abuses, including homicide, rape, imprisonment of relatives as bargaining chips, exposure to sometimes lethally extreme temperatures, and brutal beatings.

"Sexual assault was never approved, nudity was never approved, humiliation by having women present was never approved, and nor was subjecting someone to prolonged torture to the point of exhaustion or worse," Denbeaux told The Guardian.

"Prisoners died of torture at Asadadad, Bagram, and Gardez in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, Camp Whitehorse, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, and an unidentified facility in Iraq."

According to a 2005 report by the National Library of Medicine—a federal agency—based on reviews of military documents, 26 War on Terror detainees died as a result of "criminal homicide," although the paper did not say how many prisoners died on the battlefield or while in U.S. custody.

"Prisoners died of torture at Asadadad, Bagram, and Gardez in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, Camp Whitehorse, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, and an unidentified facility in Iraq," the report stated. "These cases do not include deaths due to medical neglect, mortar attacks on prisons, or the shootings of rioting prisoners."

Zubaydah has never been charged with any crime or tried. He is what's known as a "forever prisoner," as the U.S. has no plans to release him.

Last month, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Zubaydah's immediate release while asserting that his continued imprisonment violates the "fundamental rules of international law" and "may constitute crimes against humanity."

\u201cCredit to @ClareDalyMEP for amplifying the UN Working Grp on Arbitrary Detention's decision in our client #AbuZubaydah's case, calling for EU states to step up and offer resettlement. Urgent action needed to end crimes against humanity, torture & arbitrary detention. #Guantanamo\u201d

— Helen Duffy (@Helen Duffy) 1683811253

Thirty men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. Only one has been convicted of a crime. Ten have cases pending before what former military prosecutors have called "rigged" military tribunals, while 16 have been approved or recommended for release.

The administration of President Joe Biden—who has expressed intent to close Guantánamo—has overseen the transfer of a handful of Gitmo prisoners to third countries.

Denbeaux said that "Abu Zubaydah is the poster child for America's torture program."

"He was the first person to be tortured, having been approved by the Department of Justice based on facts that the CIA knew to be false," Denbeaux noted. "His drawings are the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/11/drawings-by-guantanamo-forever-prisoner-abu-zubaydah-expose-details-of-us-torture/feed/ 0 394219 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/03/memo-reveals-how-sandra-day-oconnor-helped-get-george-w-bush-to-the-white-house/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/03/memo-reveals-how-sandra-day-oconnor-helped-get-george-w-bush-to-the-white-house/#respond Wed, 03 May 2023 19:41:12 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/sandra-day-o-connor

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor played a greater role than previously known in handing the highly contentious 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, a document released Tuesday by the Library of Congress revealed.

It has long been known that O'Connor—who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan and was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court—wanted Bush to win the 2000 election, at least in part because of her right-wing views; her admiration for his father, former President George H. W. Bush; and because she wanted to retire after a Republican president nominated her replacement.

However, the newly released documents—part of a trove of former Justice John Paul Stevens' papers—include a four-page memo O'Connor sent to her colleagues on December 10, 2000, even before they heard arguments in Bush v. Gore. Her memo laid the groundwork for the controversial 5-4 ruling that stopped Florida's court-ordered recount in a too-close-to-call contest between Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore and gave the presidency to the Republican Texas governor.

In her memo, O'Connor attacked the unanimous November 21, 2000 Florida Supreme Court decision that the results of manual ballot recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties must be included in the final state tally, while giving the three counties five days to certify their results.

"Before there was 2020 there was 2000."

During that period, Bush's legal team appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court while self-described "dirty trickster" Matt Schlapp and future seven-count felon Roger Stone led an effort to fly hundreds of paid operatives to Florida to harass and intimidate Miami-Dade officials—the so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot"—in a bid to thwart their court-ordered work.

"I am concerned that the Florida Supreme Court transgressed the lines of authority drawn by Article II of the federal Constitution in substantially changing the state Legislature's statutory scheme for the appointment of presidential electors," O'Connor wrote.

"The Florida Supreme Court provided no uniform, statewide method for identifying and separating the undervotes," she noted, a reference to instances when voting machines could not read ballots.

\u201cBefore there was 2020 there was 2000 ....\n\nhttps://t.co/8gHDBXXdgK\u201d

— Jocelyn Benson (@Jocelyn Benson) 1683072858

"Accordingly, there was no guarantee that those ballots deemed undervotes had not been previously tabulated," O'Connor asserted. "More importantly, the court failed to provide any standard more specific than the 'intent of the voter' standard to govern this statewide undervote recount. Therefore, each individual county was left to devise its own standards."

O'Connor noted that the Florida Legislature "has created a detailed, if not perfectly crafted statutory scheme that provides for the appointment of presidential electors by direct election," and that "the Legislature has designated the secretary of state as the 'chief election officer.'"

Florida's secretary of state at the time, Katherine Harris, was not only a Republican, she also co-chaired Bush's campaign in the state. On November 26, 2000 Harris declared Bush the winner in Florida by 537 votes, even though there were counties still tallying ballots.

Ignoring this obvious conflict of interest, O'Connor said the Florida Supreme Court "disregarded the secretary of state's delegated duty to exercise her discretion to determine whether to accept the state's late returns" and whether a manual recount requested by Gore was warranted.

Gore had asked for recounts in four heavily Democratic counties amid drama over dimpled, pregnant, and hanging chads; butterfly and caterpillar ballots; write-in votes; overcounts; undercounts; and a bewildering barrage of strange new terms. Some political commentators have argued that Gore's failure to request a statewide manual recount may have been a fatal miscalculation.

\u201cA reminder that the Republicans successfully stole a presidential election 23 years ago...and their hackish Justices on the Supreme Court played a key role in their doing so. https://t.co/2qkSr2svmt\u201d

— @Ben_Alpers@mastodon.online \ud83d\uddfd (@@Ben_Alpers@mastodon.online \ud83d\uddfd) 1683070110

The day after O'Connor circulated her memo, Justice Anthony Kennedy, another Reagan appointee and frequent swing vote, wrote to right-wing Chief Justice William Rehnquist endorsing her "very sound approach."

Rehnquist—who was appointed by Republican former President Richard Nixon—was a proponent of what is now called the independent state legislature theory (ISLT), the fringe right-wing notion that state lawmakers alone can regulate federal elections. Hard-right Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two of the five votes for Bush, also embraced the dubious theory.

Prominent purveyors of former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" have cited ISLT when pushing state lawmakers to help overturn President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Thomas' wife Ginni Thomas—who in 2000 solicited resumes for positions in the presumptive Bush administration before her husband cast his decisive vote in Bush v. Gore—unsuccessfully pressed Arizona state lawmakers to invoke ISLT in service of Trump's ill-fated effort to reverse his 2020 loss.

Notably, Bush's legal team in Bush v. Gore included current right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina voting rights case currently before the court, could decide the legal validity of ISLT.

\u201cOne member of George W. Bush's legal team was especially enthusiastic about the "independent state legislature" theory: Brett Kavanaugh. \n\nHere he is endorsing it in 2000. \n\nNow Kavanaugh gets a chance to write it into law. Talk about a long game. https://t.co/VlnfRdeCy6\u201d

— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern) 1670424929

On December 12, 2000 the justices ruled in a 7-2 per curiam opinion that Florida's court-ordered recount must be stopped on equal protection grounds, and 5-4 that there was no other way to recount all of the contested votes in a timely manner. Rehnquist, Kennedy, O'Connor, Scalia, and Thomas voted in favor of Bush, while Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Stevens dissented.

In his stirring dissent, Stevens presciently noted that "although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judges as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Four out of the five justices who sided with Bush were accused of conflicts of interest: Rehnquist and O'Connor were septuagenarians who had stated their desire to retire during a Republican presidency—the latter reportedly exclaimed "this is terrible" in response to a TV news report showing Gore leading on election night; Thomas' wife was headhunting personnel for a potential Bush administration; and two of Scalia's sons worked for law firms representing Bush. None of the four justices recused themselves from Bush v. Gore. Bush later nominated Eugene Scalia for U.S. labor solicitor.

\u201cWhen I was a kid I really really looked up to the Supreme Court justices. We all learned how they get lifetime appointments to make sure they can\u2019t be influenced etc\u2026with Thomas, Alito, O\u2019Connor, Kavanaugh, and all\u2026I definitely don\u2019t feel the same way.\n\nhttps://t.co/6YZYqMFvAM\u201d

— Yuh-Line Niou (@Yuh-Line Niou) 1683092690

O'Connor—who is now 93 years old—would come to have regrets, which she expressed years after her 2006 retirement. In 2013, she told the Chicago Tribune editorial board that Bush v. Gore "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."

"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," she said. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

There were other reasons why some commentators refer to the 2000 presidential election as "stolen." Chiefly, massive voter disenfranchisement resulting from racist policies of Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—the GOP candidate's brother—played what one federal civil rights official called an "outcome-determinative" role in the state's, and therefore the nation's, results.

Scalia infamously dismissed his friend Bader Ginsburg's concerns over Black disenfranchisement as the "Al Sharpton Footnote," and habitually advised Americans disturbed by Bush v. Gore to "get over it."

\u201cThe article included extensive evidence that Ginsburg was right to be concerned. When Scalia died 2 years later, his obnoxious & dismissive Sharpton remark - which said a great deal about who he was - didn\u2019t make it into the many think pieces about his tenure on the Court.\u201d

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sherrilyn Ifill) 1683083845

However, it was ultimately the Supreme Court's cessation of the unfinished Florida recounts, and Gore's subsequent meek acquiescence "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy," that handed victory to Bush.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/03/memo-reveals-how-sandra-day-oconnor-helped-get-george-w-bush-to-the-white-house/feed/ 0 392369 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/harry-belafonte-in-his-own-words-on-opposing-iraq-war-calling-george-w-bush-a-terrorist/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/harry-belafonte-in-his-own-words-on-opposing-iraq-war-calling-george-w-bush-a-terrorist/#respond Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:15:59 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=6295e927e7b2bba3380d5c11fa28697f
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/harry-belafonte-in-his-own-words-on-opposing-iraq-war-calling-george-w-bush-a-terrorist/feed/ 0 390583 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/harry-belafonte-in-his-own-words-on-opposing-iraq-war-calling-george-w-bush-a-terrorist-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/harry-belafonte-in-his-own-words-on-opposing-iraq-war-calling-george-w-bush-a-terrorist-2/#respond Wed, 26 Apr 2023 12:39:13 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=a4e1fc5565817bb97cc246983de7d3b9

As we remember the life and legacy of Harry Belafonte, we look back at his antiwar activism, including his outspoken opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. On February 15 of that year, amid global protests against the war, Belafonte addressed hundreds of thousands who rallied in New York City and called for peace. “We have let the world know that we are in solidarity with those who seek to have other ways than war to settle our grievances,” he told Democracy Now! Belafonte later made worldwide headlines in 2006 when, on a trip to Venezuela, he called President George W. Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/26/harry-belafonte-in-his-own-words-on-opposing-iraq-war-calling-george-w-bush-a-terrorist-2/feed/ 0 390624 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/05/now-do-bush-trump-arraignment-contrasts-typical-impunity-for-us-leaders/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/05/now-do-bush-trump-arraignment-contrasts-typical-impunity-for-us-leaders/#respond Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:49:42 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-bush-putin-war-crimes

The historic arraignment of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday highlighted how infrequently American political leaders are held accountable for any crimes.

"The last time anything remotely similar happened was" in 1872, when a police officer arrested then-President Ulysses S. Grant for speeding in a two-horse carriage—an incident that only came to light in a 1908 interview,The New York Timesreported.

Trump, now a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, faces 34 felony counts for allegedly "falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election."

As Free Speech for People noted, the twice-impeached former president still has not faced legal consequences for alleged "crimes related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the events leading up to it; crimes related to Trump's January 2, 2021 phone call demanding that the Georgia Secretary of State 'find 11,780 votes'... the obstruction of justice crimes identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the second part of his report; crimes identified by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence related to Trump's attempts to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy; and others."

"Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the U.S. system of impunity."

Trump's prosecution in New York "is a good first step," according toThe Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, but it "is not evidence that our much-vaunted justice system can actually be applied fairly and evenly to all, even a former president."

"Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the U.S. system of impunity that has long permeated our system of American exceptionalism," the journalist argued Tuesday. "This case against Trump would be a mere footnote of history, albeit a wild one, if the U.S. actually believed in holding presidents and other top officials accountable for their crimes, including those committed in office."

Pointing to former U.S. President George W. Bush; his vice president, Dick Cheney; and Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he asserted, "The truth is that all of them should be serving substantial prison sentences for directing and orchestrating the gravest of criminal activity: war crimes."

However, former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) "steadfastly refused to even consider impeachment proceedings against Bush," and former President Barack Obama made clear that "no one would be prosecuted for running a secret global kidnap and torture regime under Bush and Cheney," Scahill wrote. "The system depends on such bipartisan impunity."

The prosecution of Trump comes on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. Just ahead of that milestone last month, the U.S-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) renewed its call for reparations and accountability.

"Reparations are rooted in precedent and international law, as well as a strong tradition of justice-based organizing by civil rights movements, and we should not let the difficulty of securing justice deter us from seeking it—for Iraqis and for all others harmed by U.S. imperialism, exploitation, and genocide," CCR said. "Justice also entails accountability for the perpetrators of these horrific crimes, including those responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq."

CCR further demanded justice for those tortured and detained in the broader war against terrorism that Bush declared in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks—while also acknowledging that "legal efforts against high-level political and military leaders for the invasion itself and the many crimes committed in the 'war on terror' pose a different set of challenges, as demonstrated by our efforts to hold high-level Bush administration officials accountable at the International Criminal Court for crimes in or arising out of the war in Afghanistan or under universal jurisdiction."

The United States is notably not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the treaty which established the Hague-based tribunal to investigate and prosecute people from around the world for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

Nearly a year after 9/11, Bush signed into law the American Servicemembers' Protection Act. Dubbed the "Hague Invasion Act" by critics, it empowers the president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release" of any U.S. or allied person "who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court."

Last month, roughly a year into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the ICC issued international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for allegedly abducting Ukrainian children.

While Putin has "exhibited zero concern about his indictment," his "invasion of Ukraine has created an interesting predicament for the U.S. empire on these matters," Scahill highlighted, explaining that though President Joe Biden has called the Russian leader a war criminal, the United States has long "encouraged ad hoc tribunals" rather than supporting ICC prosecutions.

"The whole purpose of this from the U.S. perspective is to ensure that these laws will never be applied to Americans or their friends," he wrote. "The prosecution of Trump should thus serve as a reminder that the U.S. does not actually believe in holding its most powerful citizens accountable for even the most serious of acts. And that position has real consequences, including in how it can be weaponized by criminals like Putin."

"Make no mistake, Trump should be prosecuted for a variety of crimes, committed both as a private citizen and public official," Scahill concluded. "But if we want to claim that our system is exceptional, then the same fate should be brought to bear on the Bushes, Cheneys, and Kissingers of the world as well."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower on April 3, 2023, in New York City.

Photo: Getty Images

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

A coalition of Democratic U.S. lawmakers led by Reps. Cori Bush and Ayanna Pressley on Tuesday announced the launch of a new caucus aimed at realizing the centurylong goal of adding an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

"It has been 100 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first drafted and introduced in Congress, and more than a half century since both chambers passed it," Bush (D-Mo.) said in a statement announcing the founding of the Congressional Equal Rights Amendment Caucus. "That is far too long for women, Black and Brown folks, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups to wait for constitutional gender equality—and we refuse to wait any longer."

Pressley (D-Mass.) said: "I am proud to launch the ERA Caucus with my sister-in-service Congresswoman Bush to affirm the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, establish gender equality as a national priority, and center our most vulnerable and marginalized communities, who stand to benefit the most."

Caucus member Rep. Summer Lee (D-Penn.) said that "it's not shocking that when the Constitution was first drafted, women, Black, Brown, queer, and marginalized folks were intentionally written out. What is shocking is that in 2023, our Constitution still does not include equal rights regardless of sex—meaning our Constitution still does not reflect or protect all people."

"To the right-wing politicians and judges waging a full-on assault on the rights of women and queer youth, we're not afraid and we won't be silenced," Lee added. "We're organized and mobilized to make equal rights the law of the land."

After passing the House in 1971 and the Senate the following year, the ERA was submitted to the states for ratification. Congress set a March 1979 deadline for ratification; only 35 of the requisite 38 states approved the proposal by that time. Although the deadline was extended until 1982, no more states ratified the amendment and several state legislatures voted to rescind their ratifications.

A 21st-century effort to revive the ERA saw Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia approve the measure in recent years. Supporters say 38 states have now backed the ERA, although there is uncertainty over the expired deadlines and rescinded ratifications.

Pressley's office said that in addition to affirming the ERA, the new congressional caucus will "raise awareness in Congress to establish constitutional gender equality as a national priority; partner with an inclusive intergenerational, multiracial coalition of advocates, activists, scholars, organizers, and public figures; and center the people who stand to benefit the most from gender equality, including Black and Brown women, LGBTQ+ people, people seeking abortion care, and other marginalized groups."

In a Tuesday interview with The Hill, Pressley said she was "thinking a lot about my 14-year-old daughter, Cora, and how I do not want her to continue to live in a country in a world where we have so conflated and normalized the disparate treatment and outcomes and disparate access and the second-class status it is to be a woman in this society."

"I look forward to the day when calendars will say and on this day in history, the ERA caucus was established," she added, "but I really look forward to the day when our calendars will say on this day in history, the ERA was passed."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As the world this week mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, journalism experts weighed in on the corporate media's complicity in amplifying the Bush administration's lies, including ones about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons upon which the war was waged.

"Twenty years ago, this country's mainstream media—with one notable exception—bought into phony Bush administration claims about Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis," Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote Sunday.

That "one notable exception" was a group of journalists at the Washington, D.C. bureau of Knight Ridder—which was acquired by McClatchy in 2006—who published dozens of articles in several of the company's papers debunking and criticizing the Bush administration's dubious claims about Iraq and its WMDs. Their efforts were the subject of the 2017 Rob Reiner film Shock and Awe, starring Woody Harrelson.

"The war—along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of Bush administration officials—also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of ISIS, and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis," Abcarian noted.

She continued:

That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases: "WMD," "the axis of evil," "regime change," "yellowcake uranium," "the coalition of the willing," and a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

"Of course," wrote Abcarian, "there was never any smoking gun, mushroom-shaped or not."

According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative journalism organization, Bush and top administration officials—including then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Rice—"made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Those lies were dutifully repeated by most U.S. corporate mainstream media in what the center called "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," David Corn, the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones, asserted Monday.

Far from paying a price for amplifying the Bush administration's Iraq lies, many of the media hawks who acted more like lapdogs than watchdogs 20 years ago are today ensconced in prestigious and well-paying positions in media, public policy, and academia.

In a where-are-they-now piece for The Real News Network, media critic Adam Johnson highlighted how the careers of several media and media-related government professionals "blossomed" after their lie-laden selling of the Iraq War:

• David Frum—Bush's lead writer who coined the term "Axis of Evil" to refer to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—is "a well-paid and influential columnist for The Atlantic and a mainstay of cable TV."
• Jeffrey Goldberg, then a New Yorker reporter who pushed conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and al-Qaeda to Iraq, is now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
• MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, an erstwhile Iraq War hawk, rebranded himself as a critic of the invasion and occupation, and is a multimillionaire morning show host on that same network.
• Fareed Zakaria hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
• Anne Applebaum, a member of the Post's editorial board at the time who called evidence of Iraq's nonexistent WMDs "irrefutable," now writes for The Atlantic and is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
  

In an interview with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—which is hosting a discussion Wednesday about the media's role in war and peace—Middle East expert Assal Rad noted:

Rather than challenging the narrative of the state, calling for evidence, or even humanizing the would-be victims of the war, the Iraqi people, reporters such as Thomas Friedman with significant platforms like The New York Times most often parroted the talking points of U.S. officials. There was little critical journalism to question the existence of WMDs and little reflection on important issues, such as the U.S. role in supporting Saddam Hussein in the 1980s against Iran, international law, or the humanity of Iraqis.

While there was some contrition from outlets including the Times as the Iraq occupation continued for years and not the "five days or five weeks or five months" promised by Rumsfeld, journalist Jon Schwarz of The Intercept noted that media lies and distortions about the war continue to this day.

"Perhaps the most telling instance of the media's acquiescence was a year after the Iraq invasion," said Rad, "when President Bush's joke at the White House Correspondents' dinner about finding no weapons of mass destruction was met with uproarious laughter from an audience of journalists."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Friday marked the upcoming 20th anniversary of the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq—where thousands of U.S. troops remain today—by asking if Americans have learned anything from the "failed war of aggression" and warning that waging another such war will have even more dire consequences.

In a Twitter thread, Omar (D-Minn.) asserted that "20 years later, the Iraq War remains the biggest foreign policy disaster of our generation, one that took thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives."

As Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates as many as 580,000 people were killed in Iraq and Syria since 2003 and nearly 15 million people were made refugees or internally displaced by the war—which is forecast to cost a staggering $2.9 trillion by 2050.

The war was waged—under false pretenses against a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks—by neoconservative Republicans in the Bush administration who since before 9/11 had sought a way to invade Iraq and oust erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein. The horrors of war and occupation included torture, indiscriminate killing, sex crimes, environmental devastation, and soaring birth defects caused by the use of depleted uranium weapons.

What then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer called Operation Iraqi Liberation—OIL—devastated much of Iraq but enriched multinational corporations while creating a power vacuum that was eventually filled by Islamic State, whose rise to power in much of Iraq and neighboring Syria led to a second phase of the war launched during the administration of former President Barack Obama that continues today.

"Have we fully learned the lessons from this failed war of aggression, or are we doomed to repeat it?" Omar asked.

"Our foreign policy discourse remains fundamentally pro-war," Omar noted. "Think tanks (often the same ones who cheerled the Iraq War) outflank each other to justify armed conflict and derail diplomacy with adversaries like Iran."

Omar—whom Republicans recently ousted from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs—continued:

Instead of seeing China as a geopolitical challenge to be managed, politicians gin up jingoistic sentiment and nationalism to see who can be the most "anti-China."

Our spending on Pentagon waste and new weapons continues to rise uncontrollably—with weapons contractors wielding more lobbying power than ever in Washington.

Our national media too often treat war as a game—a way to juice ratings as fewer Americans turn into TV news—rather than the most horrific state of conditions to be avoided at all costs.

Claims from senior national security officials are reported as fact, even when no evidence for those claims is presented.

Much like the lost Iraqi lives lost were often ignored 20 years ago, we continue to ignore the pain and suffering of Black and Brown people in places like Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Haiti, and more.

"To truly be able to avoid another Iraq, we need a national reckoning with how we got into it the first place," argued Omar, who fled civil war in Somalia with her family when she was a child.

"We need accountability for those who got us into this war," Omar said. "But most of all we need to see all of our lives connected as part of the human fabric—to understand that the parent who loses a child in war could be us, that the child who is displaced could be our child."

"Because the next Iraq," she added, "will be even worse."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Cori Bush on Thursday introduced legislation that would prohibit pharmaceutical companies from charging more than $20 for a vial of insulin, a move that comes a week after Eli Lilly pledged to cap out-of-pocket payments for its insulin products at $35 per month.

"As a nurse, I've seen too many people in our communities struggle to afford their lifesaving insulin medication," Bush (D-Mo.) said in a statement. "People are left choosing between insulin or groceries; insulin or rent; insulin or child care. This is unacceptable."

More than 7 million people across the U.S. use insulin to manage their diabetes, and some have been forced to pay upwards of $1,000 per month for the medicine as pharmaceutical giants have jacked up prices with abandon in recent decades.

According to one study published in October, more than a million people in the U.S. have had to ration insulin due to the high cost.

Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and a longtime advocate of insulin price reform, said Thursday that "there is no reason why Americans should pay the highest prices in the world for insulin—in some cases, ten times as much as people in other countries."

"In 1923, the inventors of insulin sold their patents for $1 to save lives, not to turn pharmaceutical executives into billionaires," said Sanders. "Now, 100 years later, unacceptable corporate greed has caused the price of this lifesaving medication to skyrocket by over 1,000% since 1996. We can no longer tolerate a rigged healthcare system that forced 1.3 million people with diabetes to ration insulin while the three major insulin manufacturers made $21 billion dollars in profits."

"Now is the time for Congress to take on the greed and power of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially lower the price of insulin," the senator added. "In the richest country in the history of the world, no one should die because they cannot afford the medication they need."

If passed, the Insulin for All Act of 2023 would cap the list price of insulin nationwide at "$20 per 1000 units... which may be contained in one or more vials, pens, cartridges, or other forms of delivery."

Original co-sponsors of the legislation include Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon.

"Big Pharma continues to rake in record profits by gouging patients on insulin prices," Merkley said in a statement. "Unaffordable high prices are forcing patients to ration their insulin, leading to dire health consequences—heart attacks, stroke, blindness, kidney failure, foot disease and amputations, even death. It's tragic, it's unacceptable, and it's time to end this rip-off."

The new bill is also backed by more than 70 advocacy organizations, including T1International, Public Citizen, and Social Security Works.

"This bill being called the Insulin for All Act of 2023 shows the power of grassroots activism," said Elizabeth Pfiester, a patient with Type 1 diabetes and the founder and executive director of T1International, the group behind the #insulin4all campaign.

"We know that Eli Lilly isn't lowering the list price of one of their insulins out of the goodness of their hearts," Pfiester added. "That's why policy change to ensure patients with diabetes can't be exploited anymore is essential."

Eli Lilly's decision earlier this month to slash the prices of its most-prescribed insulin products by 70% was cautiously welcomed by advocates who have been organizing against insulin price gouging for years.

But campaigners stressed that given the serious limitations of Eli Lilly's pledge—and the company's ability to raise prices again whenever it chooses—federal action is still necessary to ensure lower costs for everyone, including those who use products made by the other two giant insulin manufacturers, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk.

The three companies produce more than 90% of the global insulin supply, market dominance that has allowed them to drive up costs massively—drawing legal action from several U.S. states, including California.

Last April, Human Rights Watch released a report showing that Eli Lilly has raised the list price of Humalog by an inflation-adjusted 680% since it first began selling the product in the late 1990s. The company vowed earlier this month to slash the list price of Humalog by 70% starting in the fourth quarter of this year.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Sen. Bernie Sanders(I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Rep. Cori Bush(D-Mo.) on Thursday introduced legislation that would cap the list price of insulin at no more than $20 per vial, substantially reducing the cost of the lifesaving drug for the more than 7 million people who use insulin across the United States and the 1.3 million Americans who were forced to ration insulin last year.

“There is no reason why Americans should pay the highest prices in the world for insulin – in some cases, ten times as much as people in other countries,” said Sen. Sanders. “In 1923, the inventors of insulin sold their patents for $1 to save lives, not to turn pharmaceutical executives into billionaires. Now, 100 years later, unacceptable corporate greed has caused the price of this lifesaving medication to skyrocket by over 1,000 percent since 1996. We can no longer tolerate a rigged health care system that forced 1.3 million people with diabetes to ration insulin while the three major insulin manufacturers made $21 billion dollars in profits. Now is the time for Congress to take on the greed and power of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially lower the price of insulin. In the richest country in the history of the world, no one should die because they cannot afford the medication they need.”

“As a nurse, I’ve seen too many people in our communities struggle to afford their life-saving insulin medication. People are left choosing between insulin or groceries; insulin or rent; insulin or child care. This is unacceptable,” said Congresswoman Bush. “That is why I am so proud to join Senator Sanders in introducing the Insulin for All Act, legislation that will effectively cap the price of insulin at $20 per vial. We cannot solely rely on the whims of pharmaceutical companies to set standards of patient care and determine who can afford medication. Congress must act swiftly to remove the costly burden of insulin for patients with diabetes and save lives.”

While Eli Lilly and Company, after significant public pressure, recently announced a 70 percent price cut for Humalog, the company has not yet moved to reduce the price of other insulin products. Novo Nordisk and Sanofi – which along with Eli Lilly make up 90 percent of the insulin market in the U.S. – have not made any commitment to lower their prices at all. When Eli Lilly first launched Humalog in 1996, it set the price close to $20.

Joining Sanders and Bush on the Insulin for All Act of 2023 are Sens. Ed Markey(D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Reps. Jamaal Bowman(D-N.Y.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-N.Y.), Jesús G. "Chuy" García (D-Ill.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), Al Green (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal(D-Wash.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), Ayanna Pressley(D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib(D-Mich.).

“Big Pharma continues to rake in record profits by gouging patients on insulin prices,” said Sen. Merkley. “Unaffordable high prices are forcing patients to ration their insulin, leading to dire health consequences – heart attacks, stroke, blindness, kidney failure, foot disease and amputations, even death. It’s tragic, it’s unacceptable, and it’s time to end this rip-off. No one should have to go bankrupt just to afford the daily medication they need to stay healthy. It’s time to put people above profits, and tell the big drug companies that their days extorting Americans who need insulin to survive are over.”

“I am proud of capping insulin copays at $35 for Medicare recipients as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, but the work doesn’t stop there. Corporate profit shouldn’t dictate access to vital health care,” said Sen. Markey. “Guaranteeing affordable insulin for all won’t just lessen the burden that is the sky-high cost of health care in this country — it’ll save lives, keep people out of the emergency room, and ensure the seven million Americans who rely on insulin have access to the medicine they need.”

While researchers estimate that a vial of insulin costs just $8 to manufacture, the price of insulin has gone up by over 1,000 percent since 1996. Sanofi’s Lantus costs $292 per vial. Novo Nordisk’s Novolog is listed at $289. Eli Lilly’s Lyumjev can be purchased for $275. People with diabetes face nearly $17,000 per year in medical expenses, more than half of which is directly attributable to their diabetes, and health care for people with diabetes accounts for one in four health care dollars in the U.S.

In 2019, Sanders took a busload of people with diabetes from Michigan to Canada, where they were able to purchase the same insulin products that they bought in the U.S. for one-tenth the price. Earlier this month, Sanders sent letters calling on Sanofi and Novo Nordisk to follow Eli Lilly in reducing the price of insulin.

The Insulin for All Act of 2023 also garnered the support of more than 70 major organizations, including: T1International, The Insulin Initiative, The Diabetes Link, Mutual Aid Diabetes, Social Security Works, Public Citizen, Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, American Federation of Teachers, American Medical Student Association, Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, National Domestic Workers Alliance, United Mine Workers of America, Center for Medicare Advocacy, Doctors for America, Indivisible, and MoveOn.

Read the bill text, here.
Read the bill summary, here.
Read the full list of supporting organizations, here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Borrowers, advocates, and lawmakers converged on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday night and Tuesday morning to defend President Joe Biden's stalled student debt relief plan as justices prepared to consider a pair of right-wing challenges to the popular proposal.

Attendees argued that Biden's move to erase up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers with individual incomes under $125,000 and modify the income-driven repayment program is just, legal, and necessary. Although it falls short of progressives' demands for universal cancellation, speakers made clear that the White House's plan is key to improving economic security.

"You should not have to face financial ruin because you want a damn education!" Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said during Tuesday morning's rally. "Education, from child care to graduate school, is a human right. It should be free to all."

"Today we say to the Supreme Court, listen to the needs of millions of struggling people," Sanders added. "Do the right thing. Support Biden's proposal to cancel student debt."

"President Biden's executive authority to provide student debt relief to borrowers is abundantly clear."

After Monday night's rally, some campaigners planned to camp out overnight in a bid to secure seats in the courtroom for Tuesday's oral arguments, which began at 10:00 am ET.

In both Biden v. Nebraska—brought by the Republican-led states of Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina—and Department of Education v. Brown—filed with the support of billionaires by a pair of plaintiffs who claim they were unfairly excluded from relief—the right-wing-controlled Supreme Court will decide whether Biden's plan exceeds the U.S. Department of Education's (DOE) authority and whether the lawsuits have legal standing.

In a Tuesday statement released ahead of the hearing, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri said, "Today, far-right Republican attorneys general will bring baseless and politically motivated arguments to the Supreme Court in opposition to providing student debt relief promised to 40 million borrowers across our country."

"Regardless," said Bush, "President Biden's executive authority to provide student debt relief to borrowers is abundantly clear—just look at the facts."

Bush continued:

Fact: The basis of the Republican AG's case relies on the claim that this relief plan threatens the profits of loan servicers such as MOHELA and states will be financially injured. Yet, in response to an October letter I sent to MOHELA, they denied involvement in the case and discredited Republicans by stating that they don’t operate to make profits and remain committed to complying with contractual obligations set forth by the U.S. Department of Education.

Fact: Republicans claim that states, like Missouri, also rely on revenue from loan servicers like MOHELA. Yet, MOHELA hasn’t paid their bills to the state in over a decade and owes over $100 million to the state of Missouri.

Fact: President Biden's student debt relief plan would provide 40 million borrowers across our country—including 144,000 of my constituents—with life-changing financial relief. Following the economic devastation of the pandemic, we need transformative policy solutions to foster an equitable economic recovery.

"I know what it's like to carry crushing student debt and to have to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying an exorbitant student loan bill," said Bush. "And I've heard from people across the country who have shared how this relief would change their lives—from being able to afford child care, to paying their medical bills, to being able to put food on the table."

"The facts are clear, and I implore the Supreme Court to affirm the president's executive authority to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt," she added. "I'm confident the Biden-Harris administration's plan will withstand these hurdles and provide the much-needed relief to borrowers."

Right-wing lawmakers and activists filed numerous lawsuits after the White House announced its student debt cancellation bid in August. Applications for relief closed in November after a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump blocked Biden's plan. At the time, 26 million borrowers had already applied for or were automatically eligible for relief, and 16 million applications were given the green light and sent to loan servicers.

While GOP members of Congress argue that student debt relief is a regressive policy whose benefits would flow disproportionately to wealthy households, DOE data released earlier this month dispels that myth. According to a Politicoanalysis of the data, over 98% of people who applied before the portal was frozen reside in ZIP codes where the average per-capita income is under $75,000. Nearly two-thirds of applicants live in neighborhoods where the average person makes less than $40,000 per year.

With his relief initiative on hold, Biden extended the pause on federal student loan repayments—a measure that was introduced at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and had been set to expire on December 31, 2022—through June 30, 2023. Payments are set to restart 60 days after that date, or 60 days after the high court hands down its decision, whichever comes first.

The Debt Collective, however, tweeted Monday night: "We're not paying that damn student debt no matter what the Supreme Court and its corrupted judges say."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Judge Andrew Napolitano is a former Superior Court Judge, a syndicated columnist, and host of the Judging Freedom podcast. Judge Napolitano has taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Delaware Law School and Seton Hall Law School, and he was Fox News’ Senior Judicial Analyst from 1997 to 2021. He is the author of several books on the U.S. Constitution, the most recent entitled Freedom’s Anchor: An Introduction to Natural Law Jurisprudence in American Constitutional History.

“I would try (Bush & Cheney) for war crimes for which there is no statute of limitations… the war crimes are well-known. The war crimes are leading us into war under false pretenses; intentionally targeting civilians in the Middle East; authorizing torture and purporting to protect it against state law if done in the U.S. and international law. These are all well-known war crimes for which the penalty is life in prison. They can also be execution… There is still an E.U.-wide arrest warrant live out there issued by Spanish authorities for the arrest of George W. Bush, because of the war crimes I have just summarized.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano

“George W. Bush, arguably the worst president in the post-World War II era for bringing us into two totally useless and very costly wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – which cost us in excess of two trillion dollars, which had over 850 thousand people killed – only five thousand were Americans – which destroyed the moral order in that part of the world for a full generation also instituted a regime of torture. I believe, Ralph, as do many of us who follow this – we haven’t seen it in writing – that Bush somehow pardoned or granted immunity to the torturers, because the torture was so vast and so extensive, and no one has been prosecuted for it. Obama and Holder who said loudly that they were against torture had every opportunity to do it. And they knew the names of the torturers, but it just didn’t happen.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano

“I do believe that Rupert Murdoch called up Donald Trump and said to him, to Murdoch’s credit - to his face, although it was on the phone – ‘you are just not institutionally, constitutionally, or temperamentally, or intellectually qualified to be the president of the United States and we will not support you.’”

Judge Andrew Napolitano

This is super Sparta on steroids—the aggressiveness, the lack of diplomacy, the lack of waging peace by the US government. It’s like they’ve mothballed the charter of the State Department, which was diplomacy. They’ve turned it into a bellicose agency, sometimes much worse than the spokespeople for the Defense Department.

Ralph Nader

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Ted Olson—the former U.S. solicitor-general in the George W. Bush administration who argued against basic legal rights for Guantánamo Bay prisoners and defended their indefinite detention and torture—made a stunning admission Thursday: The Gitmo military commissions don't work and should be shut down, and the government should strike plea deals with 9/11 defendants held at the prison.

In a Wall Street Journalopinion piece, Olson—perhaps best known for his consequential reversal on the issue of same-sex marriage equality—wrote that he "led a special team of lawyers tasked with overseeing all court challenges to the government's policy of detaining terrorism suspects" at Gitmo.

In that capacity, Olson—whose wife was a passenger on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11—argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the "unlawful enemy combatants" who were imprisoned, and often tortured, at Guantánamo were not entitled to protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions. Nor were they subject to U.S. law or allowed a defense in American courts, Olson asserted, because the men (and children) were "stateless terrorists" and the prison is located on Cuban soil—even though Cuba has no jurisdiction over the military base.

"In retrospect, we made two mistakes in dealing with the detained individuals at Guantánamo," wrote Olson. "First, we created a new legal system out of whole cloth. I now understand that the commissions were doomed from the start. We used new rules of evidence and allowed evidence regardless of how it was obtained."

Evidence obtained through torture led to cases being declined or more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought. Susan J. Crawford, the Bush official in charge of deciding which terrorism suspects to try before Gitmo military commissions, declined to prosecute Mohammed al-Qhatani, the alleged would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker because, as she admitted in 2009, "we tortured" the defendant.

Col. Stuart Crouch, a Guantánamo prosecutor whose Marine Corps buddy was a pilot on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, refused to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi—who allegedly helped organize the plane's hijacking—because Ould Slahi was tortured.

In another example, seven out of eight members of a military jury convened to hear the case against Guantánamo detainee and alleged terrorist plotter Majid Khan recommended total clemency after the defendant testified how he endured torture including rape, being hung from a ceiling beam, and being subjected to the interrupted drowning method known as waterboarding while he was held at a CIA "black site" in Afghanistan.

Olson wrote that the U.S. legal system would have been more than capable of handling the cases of terrorism defendants, "but we didn't trust America's tried-and-true courts."

"In the 20 years since this ordeal began, no trial has even begun. There have been years of argument in pretrial hearings, which have produced no legal justice for the victims of 9/11," he noted. "Instead of helping Americans learn more about who carried the attacks out and why, they have produced seemingly endless litigation largely concerned with the treatment of detainees by government agents and the government's attempts to suppress certain information."

After Bush-era Pentagon General Counsel Jim Haynes allegedly told lead Guantánamo prosecutor Col. Morris Davis that acquittals were unacceptable, Morris resigned over concerns the process was "rigged." Other Gitmo prosecutors, including Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, and Capt. Carrie Wolf, also requested transfers from the "rigged" military commissions.

"Our second mistake," Olson wrote in his Journal piece, "was pursuing the death penalty through the commissions. Death penalty cases are the most hotly contested legal proceedings, given their irreversible nature. We doomed these newly created commissions to collapse under their own weight."

Olson continued:

While prosecuting these individuals in federal civilian courts would have been the right decision 15 or 20 years ago, Congress foreclosed that option in 2010 by banning the transfer of detainees to the U.S. for any purpose. Even if Congress were to lift that ban—which seems extremely unlikely—the only guarantee that federal court prosecution brings is years of appeals resulting from the legal morass of the past two decades. This is no resolution.

"If the 9/11 defendants held at Guantánamo are willing to plead guilty, and accept a life sentence at the military prison instead of the death penalty, we should accept that deal," OIson argued.

"Nothing will bring back the thousands whose lives were so cruelly taken that September day," Olson stressed. "But we must face reality and bring this process to an end. The American legal system must move on by closing the book on the military commissions and securing guilty pleas."

"The U.S. must bring these legal proceedings to as rapid and just a conclusion as possible."

Last year, military prosecutors and Guantánamo defense attorneys began negotiating potential plea deals that could spare 9/11 suspects from being executed in exchange for guilty pleas that would result in life imprisonment—and the continued operation of Gitmo for the foreseeable future.

Olson's admission is remarkable because it stands alone among top Bush, CIA, and Pentagon lawyers like Haynes, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and John Rizzo who designed, deployed, and defended the administration's policies regarding indefinite detention, torture, extraordinary rendition, and denial of basic legal rights.

Nearly 800 men and boys have been imprisoned at Guantánamo since it opened in January 2002. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, the majority of Gitmo detainees were innocent and then-President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew it.

Although Bush's successor, President Barack Obama, took steps toward closing Guantánamo and ending torture, both endured, even as Gitmo's population decreased dramatically during the Bush and Obama administrations.

Five Guantánamo detainees have been released during the tenure of President Joe Biden, including Khan, who was transferred to Belize earlier this week. Biden—whose former press secretary said closing Guantánamo is "our goal and our intention"—has been criticized for failing to close the prison after 21 years in operation.

As Olson noted in his opinion piece, 20 of the 34 remaining Guantánamo prisoners have been cleared for release. NBC News reported Thursday that "two brothers from Pakistan, Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani and Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, are also nearing transfer, according to two senior U.S. officials."

"Nine of the remaining men, including the 9/11 defendants, face charges in the military tribunals," Olson wrote. "To date, there have been a total of nine convictions, several of which have been overturned in whole or in part on appeal, mostly by U.S. federal courts. Today, there are no trial dates set for any of the still-pending cases."

Unlike Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, Gitmo's first commander, Olson does not go so far as to call for the prison's closure. However, Olson concludes that "the U.S. must bring these legal proceedings to as rapid and just a conclusion as possible."

"True justice seems unattainable," he wrote. "The best the U.S. government can do at this point is negotiate resolutions of the remaining Guantánamo cases."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As thousands of people gathered at pro-choice rallies across the United States, multiple congresswomen marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday by sharing their own experiences with abortion care and renewing calls to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its landmark ruling.

"I'm one of the 1 in 4 women in America who has had an abortion. Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but more importantly, it was MY choice," tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who has previously shared her story in a New York Timesopinion piece and during a House hearing.

"Everyone's story is different, but I know this for certain: The choice to have an abortion belongs to pregnant people, not the government. We are not free if we cannot make these fundamental choices about our bodies," she continued. "MAGA Republicans' extreme abortion bans aren't about saving lives, they're about control. We must stand up and fight these bans. Together."

Fellow Washington state Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, who was sworn in for her first term earlier this month, wrote on Twitter: "Three years ago I miscarried in the second trimester of a pregnancy. It's a painful memory but something many women have experienced. I traveled hours to the nearest clinic, and I encountered anti-choice protesters. Thankfully I got the care I needed that day."

"I had been told without an immediate abortion, or dilation and evacuation, that my life was at risk. That I could die, or not be able to have children in the future. I got the care I needed, and now I'm the mother of my 17-month-old son," she said. "On what would've been Roe v. Wade's 50th anniversary, I'm thinking of the millions of Americans with stories like mine who are forced to go without access to safe reproductive care. I won't stop fighting to restore this fundamental right and defend reproductive freedom for all."

Nearly seven months since the high court's right-wing majority overturned Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, "abortion is currently unavailable in 14 states, and courts have temporarily blocked enforcement of bans in eight others," according to a December review by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, which tracks state laws.

Just after the Dobbs decision leaked last May, Ellepublished a roundtable discussion with the only five then-members of Congress who had publicly shared abortion stories: Jayapal; Sen. Gary Peters, whose ex-wife got a potentially lifesaving emergency abortion in the 1980s; and Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who did not seek reelection last year.

In the weeks that followed, Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.)—who lost her June primary after redistricting—also detailed their abortions when they were each 19 years old. During a House hearing, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) shared that "when my doctor finally induced me, I faced the pain of labor without hope for a living child."

"Would it have been after the first miscarriage, after doctors used what would be an illegal drug to abort the lost fetus?" McBath asked. "Would you have put me in jail after the second miscarriage?"

McBath took to Twitter Sunday to highlight that testimony and warn that "without Roe, all reproductive care is on the line."

Bush—who has spoken about seeking an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of rape at 17—said in a statement Sunday that "the Roe v. Wade decision was not only historic in that it protected people accessing abortions; it also served as precedent for several more court cases and laws to follow that would further advance gender equality, reproductive rights, and our collective freedoms."

"Unfortunately, we all know what happened last June. Republicans spent decades stacking the federal judiciary with far-right anti-abortion judges and successfully stripped millions of people of their right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion care, particularly Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities," she said. "And, let's be clear, Republicans aren't stopping with Roe."

"In just their first couple of days in power, House Republicans passed two anti-abortion bills in a blatant attempt to lay the groundwork for a national abortion ban," added Bush, who was among the 17 federal lawmakers arrested in July while protesting Dobbs at the Supreme Court. "As a congresswoman, a mother, a pastor, and as a person who has had abortions, I will never stop fighting for a person's bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and for a country that lives up to its proclamation of freedom."

Moore—who represents a state where abortion is now unavailable due to a contested 1849 ban—issued a similar warning in a series of tweets, declaring that "this Roe anniversary is a reminder of what we've lost, and we must fight for a future that creates more equitable healthcare access for all."

"The chaos we've seen over the past six months is the environment anti-abortion politicians have worked for decades to create, and they won't stop with Roe. While we work to protect and restore access to abortion, more attacks on sexual and reproductive health are happening now," she said. "The path ahead will be challenging. It will require us to think bolder than ever before to ensure our very basic rights and freedoms are permanently protected—not subject to whoever happens to be in power."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

As thousands of people gathered at pro-choice rallies across the United States, multiple congresswomen marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday by sharing their own experiences with abortion care and renewing calls to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its landmark ruling.

"I'm one of the 1 in 4 women in America who has had an abortion. Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but more importantly, it was MY choice," tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who has previously shared her story in a New York Timesopinion piece and during a House hearing.

"Everyone's story is different, but I know this for certain: The choice to have an abortion belongs to pregnant people, not the government. We are not free if we cannot make these fundamental choices about our bodies," she continued. "MAGA Republicans' extreme abortion bans aren't about saving lives, they're about control. We must stand up and fight these bans. Together."

Fellow Washington state Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, who was sworn in for her first term earlier this month, wrote on Twitter: "Three years ago I miscarried in the second trimester of a pregnancy. It's a painful memory but something many women have experienced. I traveled hours to the nearest clinic, and I encountered anti-choice protesters. Thankfully I got the care I needed that day."

"I had been told without an immediate abortion, or dilation and evacuation, that my life was at risk. That I could die, or not be able to have children in the future. I got the care I needed, and now I'm the mother of my 17-month-old son," she said. "On what would've been Roe v. Wade's 50th anniversary, I'm thinking of the millions of Americans with stories like mine who are forced to go without access to safe reproductive care. I won't stop fighting to restore this fundamental right and defend reproductive freedom for all."

Nearly seven months since the high court's right-wing majority overturned Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, "abortion is currently unavailable in 14 states, and courts have temporarily blocked enforcement of bans in eight others," according to a December review by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, which tracks state laws.

Just after the Dobbs decision leaked last May, Ellepublished a roundtable discussion with the only five then-members of Congress who had publicly shared abortion stories: Jayapal; Sen. Gary Peters, whose ex-wife got a potentially lifesaving emergency abortion in the 1980s; and Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who did not seek reelection last year.

In the weeks that followed, Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.)—who lost her June primary after redistricting—also detailed their abortions when they were each 19 years old. During a House hearing, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) shared that "when my doctor finally induced me, I faced the pain of labor without hope for a living child."

"Would it have been after the first miscarriage, after doctors used what would be an illegal drug to abort the lost fetus?" McBath asked. "Would you have put me in jail after the second miscarriage?"

McBath took to Twitter Sunday to highlight that testimony and warn that "without Roe, all reproductive care is on the line."

Bush—who has spoken about seeking an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of rape at 17—said in a statement Sunday that "the Roe v. Wade decision was not only historic in that it protected people accessing abortions; it also served as precedent for several more court cases and laws to follow that would further advance gender equality, reproductive rights, and our collective freedoms."

"Unfortunately, we all know what happened last June. Republicans spent decades stacking the federal judiciary with far-right anti-abortion judges and successfully stripped millions of people of their right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion care, particularly Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities," she said. "And, let's be clear, Republicans aren't stopping with Roe."

"In just their first couple of days in power, House Republicans passed two anti-abortion bills in a blatant attempt to lay the groundwork for a national abortion ban," added Bush, who was among the 17 federal lawmakers arrested in July while protesting Dobbs at the Supreme Court. "As a congresswoman, a mother, a pastor, and as a person who has had abortions, I will never stop fighting for a person's bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and for a country that lives up to its proclamation of freedom."

Moore—who represents a state where abortion is now unavailable due to a contested 1849 ban—issued a similar warning in a series of tweets, declaring that "this Roe anniversary is a reminder of what we've lost, and we must fight for a future that creates more equitable healthcare access for all."

"The chaos we've seen over the past six months is the environment anti-abortion politicians have worked for decades to create, and they won't stop with Roe. While we work to protect and restore access to abortion, more attacks on sexual and reproductive health are happening now," she said. "The path ahead will be challenging. It will require us to think bolder than ever before to ensure our very basic rights and freedoms are permanently protected—not subject to whoever happens to be in power."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

V. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is a war crime. Although the “NATO expansion” is an apparent effort to encircle Russia on its western border with new NATO members, despite the promise of the Bush I administration not to do so, may be considered on the issue of appropriate punishment, it is no defense to the crime. In fact, aggressive war, or a war of invasion, is the “ultimate war crime” according to the Nuremberg Tribunal and the US Prosecutor Justice Jackson.

Recent precedent supports that Putin is subject to prosecution for the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal and Commission were established under the Laws of Malaysia; they had a pre-existing Statute and Rules of Procedure. They also paid for a qualified Team of Malaysian Barristers to defend the Defendants. They put on as vigorous a Defense as could have been made.

Despite that excellent defense, the accused--George W. Bush and Tony Blair--were convicted of war crimes based on overwhelming evidence of their guilt. In Kuala Lumpur, after two years of investigation by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), a tribunal (the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, or KLWCT) consisting of five judges with judicial and academic backgrounds reached a unanimous verdict (2011) that found George W. Bush and Tony Blair guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, among others as a result of their roles in the Iraq invasion.

George W. Bush, the former US President, and seven key members of his administration were found guilty of war crimes: Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee, and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

In addition to the crime of aggressive war, the trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan following the illegal invasions and wars of aggression.

At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their key legal advisors, who were all convicted as war criminals.

Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements, and other relevant material have been sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council, apparently in support of “official criminal prosecution” by that body.

Mr. Putin ought to be concerned that this precedent, along with the Nuremberg Tribunal’s rulings, indicates a serious judgment by informed members of the international community that wars of aggression, and the other crimes that unavoidably follow such invasions, will be met with condemnation and legal action. The people of the world will demand and expect accountability, as no person is above the law.

Although, as of yet, Mr. Bush and his fellow defendants have not been brought before any “official” bar of justice, their status as War criminals will follow them and dog their days should they leave the “protection” of nations arguably complicit in their crimes. They travel internationally at risk of arrest by nations committed to the rule of law. They are branded with the “mark of Cain” indelibly and arguably even more odiously.

Of course, the condemnation of Mr. Putin’s like crime by US and Allied Officials would carry more moral force should Mr. Bush et al. be charged officially by those nations in which they have sought refuge—all such nations bear a duty to do so under the law of nations. Mr. Putin should not take solace in the lack of their prosecution. The unequal application of the law, especially the law of war, has long been one of its major defects. Both "victor's justice" (no consequential prosecution of a prevailing power) and superpower impunity (no documentable legal consequences for superpower war crimes or crimes against humanity) are at issue now as in the past.

However, the Israeli example of hunting down War Criminals from the Nazi regime despite their evasion of the official Nuremberg Tribunal is but one example of what the future may hold for such criminals. Lead amongst these was Simon Wiesenthal, ironically born in Ukraine. The great mass of humanity yearns for justice, despite being burdened with “leaders” whose arrogance erroneously enables them to conclude they are immune from justice. In this regard, universal jurisdiction over war crimes has the potential to ensnare war criminals and is very threatening to the Kissingers and Rumsfelds of this world, who have curtailed their travel schedules apparently out of fear of arrest in some nations that prefer the rule of law to war and justice for all to justice for some.

Perhaps, if brought to trial, Mr. Putin will call Mr. Bush as a witness for his defense. If Mr. Bush eludes accountability, Mr. Putin may argue, then I cannot be held accountable for the invasion of Ukraine without violating the principle of “equal justice under law.” On its face, this claim has some force, especially against US efforts, if any, to prosecute Mr. Putin, as it is foundational in US law that the law applies equally to all.

If Mr. Putin is guilty, then so is Mr. Bush. Selective prosecution in War Crimes cases makes a mockery of the rule of law and supports the claim that Nuremberg and all such efforts are mere “victors justice” that ignores the war crimes of victors while punishing losers, an extreme example of “might makes right.” Surely, it falls short of Abe Lincoln’s aspirational aphorism: “right makes might.”

Or perhaps, the prosecution would call Mr. Bush as an “expert” witness on what it takes to plan and commit a war of aggression, an illegal invasion, to lay a foundation for the tribunal to evaluate Mr. Putin’s plans and acts. This could be problematic, as Mr. Bush could elect to “plead the fifth,” taking the position that his testimony could open him to criminal prosecution for the same crime as Mr. Putin—a criminal war of aggression. And were Mr. Bush to testify his own words could convict him, thus taking the fifth is valid.

Regardless of the legal morass, the foregoing creates, humanity clearly owes a debt to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal. It provides a compelling precedent for the assertion that the law of the international community repudiates “victors’ justice” and that wars of aggression are crimes.

Even Mr. Bush appears to support that view. The 43rd president was making a presentation to an audience at his presidential library in Dallas on Wednesday, May 18, 2022 when he condemned “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq – I mean Ukraine.” With such a declaration against his interest, Mr. Bush ratified the legitimacy of the Tribunal’s indictment and judgment of conviction.

The law of humanity is bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice, no matter how obstructionists like Mr. Putin, and Mr. Bush, try to stop it. On second thought, perhaps these “birds of a feather” ought to be “tried together?” Were it so, right could make might, and the rule of law could be promoted to its rightful place in a world free of war criminals.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kary Love.

Twenty-one years after the George W. Bush administration opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and 13 years after then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order for its closure—more than 150 groups on Wednesday implored the Biden administration to "act without delay" to close the notorious lockup.

"Among a broad range of human rights violations perpetrated against predominantly Muslim communities over the last two decades, the Guantánamo detention facility—built on the same military base where the United States unconstitutionally detained Haitian refugees in deplorable conditions in the early 1990s—is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law," the groups said in a letter to President Joe Biden. "The Guantánamo detention facility was designed specifically to evade legal constraints, and Bush administration officials incubated torture there."

\u201cWe\u2019re proud to join 150+ organizations globally demanding Biden #CloseGuantanamo. \n\n21 years is 21 too many. As long as the US continues to cage and dehumanize people there, we\u2019ll keep fighting to shut it down.\u201d

— CODEPINK (@CODEPINK) 1673450992

Since 2002, 779 men and boys have been held at Guantanamo, many of them tortured, and nearly all without ever being charged or tried. According to retired U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson—who served as chief of staff to Bush-era Secretary of State Colin Powell—Bush, along with his vice president and defense secretary, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, knew that most of the Gitmo prisoners were innocent, but kept them locked up for political reasons.

Obama—whose vice president was Biden—issued executive orders after entering the White House in 2009 that were meant to end torture and close Gitmo. However, Obama—who was blocked by Congress from implementing the prison's closure—broke a campaign promise and the law by actively shielding Bush-era officials from accountability while torture continued at Gitmo.

"Thirty-five remain there today, at the astronomical cost of $540 million per year, making Guantánamo the most expensive detention facility in the world," the groups' new letter states. "Guantánamo embodies the fact that the United States government has long viewed communities of color—citizens and noncitizens alike—as a security threat, to devastating consequences."

"This is not a problem of the past," the signers stressed. "Guantánamo continues to cause escalating and profound damage to the aging and increasingly ill men still detained indefinitely there, most without charge and none having received a fair trial. It has also devastated their families and communities. The approach Guantánamo exemplifies continues to fuel and justify bigotry, stereotyping, and stigma. Guantánamo entrenches racial divisions and racism more broadly, and risks facilitating additional rights violations."

\u201cAs we mark 21 years since the Guant\u00e1namo Bay prison was opened as part of the so-called global \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d we remember the 35 men who remain detained. \n\nRead the statement we released at: \nhttps://t.co/OJ9248zdDR\u201d

— The CCR (@The CCR) 1673453843

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents three of the 21 Guantánamo prisoners who have been cleared for release and which signed the letter, said in a statement:

We should not be marking another year in the life of this ignominious product of U.S. imperialism and racism as we have every January since the first anniversary of its opening in 2002. Yet we will succeed in shutting it down. Despite the lack of will of presidents who have claimed to support closure and the express desire of some political leaders to keep the prison open forever, the prison population has shrunk by 95% from its peak—the result of pressure from a broad coalition from around the globe, including the imprisoned men themselves, their families, and Guantánamo survivors who have been released.

Asked shortly after taking office whether the Biden administration will move to close Gitmo, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said "that certainly is our goal and our intention."

However, the Biden administration has taken few steps toward that goal, while spending millions of dollars on a new secret courtroom at the prison.

\u201cIt's now 21 years since the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opened. A centerpiece of a war @POTUS declared over, it looms as a symbol of racial injustice and human rights abuses, while violating the U.S. Constitution and international law. #CloseGuantanamo https://t.co/i8fxDRozbW\u201d

— FCNL (Quakers) (@FCNL (Quakers)) 1673467282

Last year, the administration released four Guantánamo prisoners, including 75-year-old Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, the oldest person ever imprisoned there.

"It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States' approach to national and human security and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused," the groups' letter argues. "Closing the Guantánamo detention facility, ending indefinite military detention of those held there, and never again using the military base for unlawful mass detention of any group of people are necessary steps towards those ends."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Progressives in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday blasted Republicans for using their narrow majority to establish a panel headed by a far-right congressman to "expose the abuses committed by the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy."

In a 221-211 vote along party lines, the GOP approved a resolution creating a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, under the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

"The goal is not justice, but to delegitimize credible investigations into people who attempted to overthrow our government."

Jordan—who infamously defied a congressional subpoena to testify about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump—took aim at the U.S. Homeland Security and Justice departments as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and key House Democrats in a Tuesday floor speech advocating for the subcommittee.

"Mr. Jordan, who was deeply involved in Mr. Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has for months been investigating what he says is a bias in federal law enforcement against conservatives," The New York Timesreported. "Now that Republicans have the majority, he plans to use his gavel and his subpoena power to escalate and expand that inquiry, including searching for evidence that federal workers have become politicized and demanding documents about ongoing criminal investigations."

While Republicans in Congress have compared their now-official panel to the historic Church Committee—which, in the 1970s, "labored for 16 months to produce a 5,000-page report that is a canonical history of the secret government," as journalist Chris Hayes wrote for The Nation in 2009—progressives, including Hayes last week, have challenged that comparison.

"In 1975, the Senate created a bipartisan Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said after the vote. "Dubbed the Church Committee, the panel uncovered the surveillance and abuses against civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as illegal programs to assassinate foreign leaders. Minnesota legend Walter Mondale served on the committee and his questions helped uncover abuses of power."

Explaining her "no" vote, Omar continued:

I had high hopes that this would be a Church-style committee, where we could investigate surveillance of American citizens, violations of civil liberties, and the intelligence community's overseas abuses of power.

It is clear that this committee is going to be one of personal grievances and defending insurrectionists, led by members who are themselves being investigated for their role in the January 6th insurrection and who have openly defied accountability by not complying with congressional subpoenas. The goal is not justice, but to delegitimize credible investigations into people who attempted to overthrow our government.

Additionally, agency oversight belongs in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform or on an independent committee. The fact that this is being formed under the Judiciary Committee suggests that the goal isn't accountability but rather to obstruct justice and undercut legal investigations they don't agree with.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), a fellow "Squad" member, was similarly critical on Tuesday.

"The federal government has already been weaponized by Republicans against Black, brown, and other marginalized groups," she said. "So unless they're investigating themselves, this Insurrection Protection Committee is a sham."

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) called the committee "a fascist power grab to evade accountability" for the January 6 attack.

Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) tied the creation of the new panel to the 15 votes and backroom deals it took last week for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to get far-right members of his party to stop blocking his path to the leadership position.

"House Republicans just created a committee with unprecedented power to review criminal investigations and access high-level intelligence for political purposes," Pocan said. "This is what Speaker McCarthy was willing to compromise to be speaker. It's wild."

There were also critics beyond Congress—including Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

"This new House subcommittee, specifically set up to investigate ongoing investigations by the Justice Department and FBI into Donald Trump and others, is dangerous and threatens accountability and the rule of law," he said. "We can't accept this as normal."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Arguing that "the death penalty is cruel, racist, and fundamentally unjust," U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Tuesday led over two dozen congressional Democrats in calling on the Biden administration to continue its 18-month pause on federal executions.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland spearheaded by Pressley (D-Mass.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbn (D-Ill.), 26 Democratic members of Congress urged the Biden administration to rescind a series of Trump-era amendments that expanded execution methods, allowed the Justice Department to skip important regulatory steps while pursuing federal executions, and made state prisons and personnel available for federal executions, among other changes.

"The death penalty is archaic, barbaric, and cold-hearted; it destroys families and communities, and its abolition is long overdue."

The 2020 amendments "were adopted in the middle of an alarming rush of executions by the previous administration," the letter states. "Ending a 17-year moratorium on the federal death penalty, the prior administration executed 12 men and one woman in the space of six months—exceeding the number of individuals who had been executed under the federal death penalty over the prior seven decades."

The lawmakers contended that the amendments were "promulgated by an outgoing administration in the middle of a surge of executions" and "were clearly part of an effort to facilitate that surge, and as such the amendments as a whole are so irreparably tainted that they should not remain in place."

"Last year, we commended you for your decision to impose a moratorium on federal executions while the current review of death penalty policies and procedures is pending," the lawmakers wrote. "As your memorandum announcing the moratorium recognized, there are serious concerns about arbitrariness in the application of the death penalty, the disparate impact of the death penalty on people of color, and the alarming number of exonerations of individuals previously sentenced to death."

"These concerns justified halting the use of the death penalty during the review process. They equally support halting its use permanently," the Democrats added. "In addition to rescinding the November 27, 2020 amendments, we urge you to keep in place the current moratorium on federal executions, including withdrawing all pending death notices and authorizing no new death notices. The time for this action has come."

While President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise "work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level," his administration's Justice Department disappointed progressives by seeking to kill convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Tuesday's letter came on the same day that the state of Missouri killed Amber McLaughlin by lethal injection after Republican Gov. Mike Parson showed no mercy despite McLaughlin's lifelong history of trauma and mental health issues and the fact that the jury that convicted her of murdering and raping her ex-girlfriend Beverly Guenther in 2003 did not unanimously agree that she should be executed.

Reacting to the execution of the first openly transgender person in U.S. history, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said in a statement that "Amber McLaughlin was killed by state-sanctioned, inhumane capital punishment."

"My heart is with her family and loved ones," Bush continued. "I yearn for the day when our society acknowledges that state-sanctioned murder will never achieve justice. Gov. Parson has once again failed his mandate as governor to save lives. He has actively chosen violence over mercy and as a result, only three days into the new year, our state has killed yet another person."

"The death penalty is archaic, barbaric, and cold-hearted; it destroys families and communities, and its abolition is long overdue," she added. "There are more individuals who are set to be scheduled by the state of Missouri. We must not allow another life to be taken."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Democratic Reps. Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri sent a letter Tuesday urging their home state's Republican governor to prevent the execution of 49-year-old Amber McLaughlin and commute her sentence, pointing to the "horrific abuse and neglect" she has experienced over the course of her life.

McLaughlin was convicted in 2006 of raping and killing an ex-girlfriend, Beverly Guenther. After the jury failed to reach a decision on whether McLaughlin should face death or life in prison without parole, the trial judge exploited a legal loophole and unilaterally imposed a death sentence—a move that has drawn criticism from former Missouri judges.

If the January 3, 2023 execution goes ahead as planned, McLaughlin would be the first openly trans woman to be executed in the United States.

In their letter, Bush and Cleaver noted that McLaughlin "faced a traumatic childhood and mental health issues throughout her life."

"Court records indicate her adoptive father would frequently strike her with paddles and a nightstick, and even tase her. Alongside this horrendous abuse, she was also silently struggling with her identity, grappling with what we now understand is gender dysphoria," the lawmakers wrote. "The abuse, coupled with the persistent mental turmoil surrounding her identity, led to mild neurological brain damage and multiple suicide attempts both as a child and as an adult."

"Yet at the sentencing phase of Ms. McLaughlin's trial, the jury never heard crucial mental health evidence because her lawyers failed to present it. A psychiatrist was set to testify and provide expert insight into Ms. McLaughlin’s mental health at the time of the offense before her lawyers decided not to call him as a witness," Bush and Cleaver continued. "The lawyers had previously told the jury that this expert testimony would be a critical component in their decision, but the testimony was withheld and the jury deliberated without highly relevant information."

Bush made clear on social media that her effort to prevent McLaughlin's execution stems from her principled opposition to the death penalty, which she described as "cruel, barbaric, and inhumane."

Earlier this month, McLaughlin's lawyers filed a clemency petition urging Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to intervene and stop the planned execution, laying out in detail the abuse she faced as a child.

"McLaughlin developed in a womb poisoned by alcohol and she has borne the lifetime effects of fetal alcohol exposure," the petition reads. "This prenatal assault signaled the start of a path of trauma and neglect that would become the rule for McLaughlin’s life. McLaughlin faced an environment with parents ill-equipped to act as caregivers. Trauma, neglect, and abuse at the hands of her parents occurred from birth—until she was abandoned by her mother and placed into the foster care system. At one placement, McLaughlin had feces thrust into her face. The foster care placement was so bad, McLaughlin wanted to return to an abusive mother who neglected her."

The petition argues McLaughlin's execution should be called off for a number of "compelling reasons," including the fact that "executive clemency will not disturb a jury verdict imposing the death penalty because the jury did not vote to impose the death penalty."

"Second, McLaughlin consistently and genuinely expressed remorse for the death of Ms. Beverly Guenther. She remains tormented by memories of her death," the petition states. "Third, McLaughlin endured extensive childhood trauma at the hands of her biological, foster, and adoptive parents, abuse resulting in brain damage even before McLaughlin was born. Those with a moral duty to protect her wantonly inflicted this childhood abuse."

A spokesperson for Parson toldNBC News earlier this month that the governor is reviewing the clemency request.

The United States, which recently voted against a United Nations resolution condemning the death penalty, had the most botched executions in its history in 2022, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

"Seven of the 20 execution attempts were visibly problematic—an astonishing 35%—as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves," the organization noted in its year-end report. "On July 28, 2022, executioners in Alabama took three hours to set an IV line before putting Joe James Jr. to death, the longest botched lethal injection execution in U.S. history."

Bush has urged President Joe Biden to grant clemency to all federal death row inmates as a step toward ending capital punishment nationwide. Biden, who says he is personally opposed to the death penalty, has yet to heed Bush's call.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Progressive Rep. Cori Bush on Wednesday led the introduction of a pair of bills aimed at revamping the United States' chronically underfunded transportation infrastructure and ensuring the nation's public transit systems are efficient, accessible, and climate-friendly.

"For too long, we have let rail and bus services, which are fundamental infrastructure for essential workers and our public transit-reliant residents, go dramatically underfunded," said Bush (D-Mo.), who introduced the legislation alongside nearly dozens of fellow House Democrats.

"I am proud to introduce both the Bus Rapid Transit Act and the Light Rail Transit Act, legislation that would grant funds to transform public transit service in St. Louis and across our country," Bush continued. "Funding new and existing programs and resources needed for safer and more efficient services will upgrade infrastructure, create jobs, reduce emissions, improve connectivity, and make getting around our communities more equitable. I cannot wait to see more buses and rail cars out in our streets."

According to a summary released by Bush's office, the Bus Rapid Transit Act--backed by nearly 60 House Democrats--would "create a grant program to fund efficient publicly-owned Bus Rapid Transit systems across the country to improve on and expand high-quality bus service."

Basav Sen, director of the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, called the bill "visionary" and said it is what the United States needs to "advance a just transition in our transportation system, from fossil fueled automobile dependence to reliable, accessible public transit, powered by renewable energy, and providing good union jobs."

The accompanying Light Rail Transit Act would similarly bolster light rail transportation by establishing a grant program to provide public entities with funding to implement light rail projects as an alternative to automobile transportation, a major source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

"The grant program created by the bill would provide flexibility for agencies and communities applying for funds, while also maintaining strong design standards to ensure passengers have the resources and tools they need for seamless travel," Bush's office said. "The excellent labor and climate standards in the bill would ensure thousands of union jobs would be created while cars are taken off the road and new rail lines rely on renewable energy."

The light rail measure is backed by a number of climate and clean transit advocacy organizations, including Bus Riders United STL, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, the Center for Biological Diversity, Trailnet, Rise to Thrive, and Food & Water Watch.

"We applaud Representative Bush's leadership to bring equity and justice to our transportation system," said Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch. "High-quality public transportation powered by clean renewable energy is a critical component to ensuring a just transition away from fossil fuels. This proposal would help eliminate air and climate pollution while creating affordable, convenient transportation options for all."

Citing research from TransitCenter, Alissa Walker of Curbed noted Wednesday that just "10% of Americans currently live within walking distance of transit that comes every 15 minutes or less."

"Building high-capacity trains with short headways would fix that, but not all U.S. cities have rail systems," Walker wrote. "U.S. cities of all sizes have bus systems, and transit access could increase immediately for millions of people by simply increasing how often those buses run, expanding their routes, and updating fleets."

In an interview with Curbed, Bush stressed that "people depend on the bus in order to operate in their everyday lives."

"They deserve excellent service," said the Missouri Democrat.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia asserted over the weekend that former President Donald Trump's right-wing mob would have pulled off a successful coup had she and erstwhile Trump adviser Steve Bannon organized the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.

"I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would've been armed," Greene said Saturday night at the annual New York Young Republican Club dinner, during which the club's president instructed a throng of white nationalists and other far-right figures, including Donald Trump Jr., to prepare for "total war."

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who has called for the expulsion of Greene and other congressional Republicans accused of helping to plot the deadly insurrection, responded on social media by asking, "And then what?"

As Rolling Stone reported Sunday:

Greene's comments about that day seem to imply that she was not involved with the planning of Jan. 6. Two anonymous sources who organized the pro-Trump rally that preceded the Capitol attack have told Rolling Stone they recalled working with Greene on the rally. "I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically," one organizer said. "I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs." Greene's communications director told Rolling Stone in October of last year that the congresswoman was involved only in planning to object to the electoral certification on the House floor, not the rally.

But in testimony she gave under oath this year, when Greene was asked if she recalled hearing anyone mention there would be potential violence on Jan. 6 or if she talked to fellow House Republicans or the White House about Jan. 6 protests, she answered repeatedly, "I don't remember."

Greene is among the GOP lawmakers accused of giving reconnaissance tours of the Capitol to insurrectionists before the deadly attack. She has also been a staunch defender of the rioters jailed for violently attempting to prevent Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, referring to them as "political prisoners."

More than 950 people have been arrested so far. That includes nearly 300 individuals who have been charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement as well as two leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy. In the immediate aftermath of Trump's failed coup, Greene and 146 other congressional Republicans voted to reverse Biden's decisive win.

"Very soon," historian Harvey Kaye warned Monday morning, House Democrats "hand over power to the likes of her."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

The post Amtraks Across America: Hurricane Katrina Sinks the Bush Presidency appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney walk to the Oval Office, on Nov. 17, 2004, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP

While the document is a rough transcript and summary, Bush comes off as almost childishly simplistic in his insights and analysis.

When asked how the U.S. could “make the country less vulnerable to attack,” Bush “said they were trying to kill a lot of the enemy. They are killers. We had to kill them before they kill us.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jeremy Scahill.

As President Biden vows to codify abortion rights if Democrats can control Congress after the midterms, we speak with Democratic Congressmember Cori Bush, who faces reelection this November as a first-term Democrat in Missouri, where abortion was banned after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. She just wrapped up a “Roe the Vote: Reproductive Freedom Tour.” She discusses her experiences with abortion and much more in her new memoir, “The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America,” which traces her journey as a registered nurse who took part in Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson to running for the House of Representatives. “It was not easy” becoming a Black woman politician in a state and country where “true equity or equality” has not yet been achieved, says Bush.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As a federal court in her home state of Missouri heard arguments Wednesday in a case that could determine the fate of federal student debt cancellation, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush condemned GOP attorneys general for attempting to tank much-needed economic relief for tens of millions of borrowers.

"Efforts to undermine the Biden administration's student loan cancellation program are the latest example of Republicans and student loan servicers prioritizing profits over people and corporations over constituencies," Bush said in a statement as a group of GOP attorneys general—including Missouri AG Eric Schmitt—made their case for an injunction against student debt forgiveness.

"I urge MOHELA and these six Republican attorneys general to stop putting profits over the interests of student loan borrowers."

The Republican plaintiffs claim in their lawsuit that the Biden administration's student debt cancellation plan would harm the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) by depriving it of "the ongoing revenue it earns from servicing" privately held Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) loans.

In an effort to undercut such legal claims of harm, the Biden administration decided last month to scale back its debt forgiveness program to exclude many student borrowers with FFELP loans, denying relief to hundreds of thousands of people.

In her statement Wednesday, Bush noted that MOHELA "has remained silent" about the GOP lawsuit, "seemingly complicit in Republican efforts to prevent over 40 million borrowers from receiving the debt relief they have been promised."

"Actions to delay or prevent this economic program from moving forward will disproportionately harm Black and brown borrowers," Bush continued. "I urge MOHELA and these six Republican attorneys general to stop putting profits over the interests of student loan borrowers and halt all activities that interfere with the president's student loan debt cancellation plan."

"The American people overwhelmingly support student debt cancellation," the Missouri Democrat added, "and neither partisan nor corporate interests should prevent borrowers from receiving the life-changing relief they need and deserve."

In recent weeks, Republican officials and right-wing advocacy organizations have filed a number of lawsuits against the Biden administration's limited student debt cancellation program, which has yet to fully launch as the Department of Education builds out the application website—a costly undertaking that could also create additional barriers to relief for the most vulnerable borrowers.

At least one of the lawsuits against the debt relief program has already been struck down.

During Wednesday's hearing on the GOP attorneys general lawsuit, the George W. Bush-appointed federal judge appeared to voice skepticism that the Republican officials have standing to sue over the debt forgiveness program.

As Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project noted last week, "Finding a person, business, or government that will suffer a concrete and particularized injury as a result of the student debt forgiveness and that is willing to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit over it is not easy to do."

"The core legal argument against the student debt forgiveness is that the HEROES Act that the Biden administration relies upon does not actually give them the authority to do it," Bruenig explained. "But the procedural challenge is how exactly to get that legal argument in front of a judge without having your lawsuit dismissed for lack of standing.

"The fact that the Biden administration made two swift changes to the program in response to these lawsuits—including a very substantial change in cutting FFELP debtors out of relief—suggests that they are not very confident that the courts would side with them on the question of whether the HEROES Act actually allows the executive to do a student debt forgiveness of this sort," he added. "So they are trying to avoid litigating that question by changing the program to undercut theories of standing that get presented in the courts."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

As a federal court in her home state of Missouri heard arguments Wednesday in a case that could determine the fate of federal student debt cancellation, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush condemned GOP attorneys general for attempting to tank much-needed economic relief for tens of millions of borrowers.

"Efforts to undermine the Biden administration's student loan cancellation program are the latest example of Republicans and student loan servicers prioritizing profits over people and corporations over constituencies," Bush said in a statement as a group of GOP attorneys general—including Missouri AG Eric Schmitt—made their case for an injunction against student debt forgiveness.

"I urge MOHELA and these six Republican attorneys general to stop putting profits over the interests of student loan borrowers."

The Republican plaintiffs claim in their lawsuit that the Biden administration's student debt cancellation plan would harm the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) by depriving it of "the ongoing revenue it earns from servicing" privately held Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) loans.

In an effort to undercut such legal claims of harm, the Biden administration decided last month to scale back its debt forgiveness program to exclude many student borrowers with FFELP loans, denying relief to hundreds of thousands of people.

In her statement Wednesday, Bush noted that MOHELA "has remained silent" about the GOP lawsuit, "seemingly complicit in Republican efforts to prevent over 40 million borrowers from receiving the debt relief they have been promised."

"Actions to delay or prevent this economic program from moving forward will disproportionately harm Black and brown borrowers," Bush continued. "I urge MOHELA and these six Republican attorneys general to stop putting profits over the interests of student loan borrowers and halt all activities that interfere with the president's student loan debt cancellation plan."

"The American people overwhelmingly support student debt cancellation," the Missouri Democrat added, "and neither partisan nor corporate interests should prevent borrowers from receiving the life-changing relief they need and deserve."

In recent weeks, Republican officials and right-wing advocacy organizations have filed a number of lawsuits against the Biden administration's limited student debt cancellation program, which has yet to fully launch as the Department of Education builds out the application website—a costly undertaking that could also create additional barriers to relief for the most vulnerable borrowers.

At least one of the lawsuits against the debt relief program has already been struck down.

During Wednesday's hearing on the GOP attorneys general lawsuit, the George W. Bush-appointed federal judge appeared to voice skepticism that the Republican officials have standing to sue over the debt forgiveness program.

As Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project noted last week, "Finding a person, business, or government that will suffer a concrete and particularized injury as a result of the student debt forgiveness and that is willing to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit over it is not easy to do."

"The core legal argument against the student debt forgiveness is that the HEROES Act that the Biden administration relies upon does not actually give them the authority to do it," Bruenig explained. "But the procedural challenge is how exactly to get that legal argument in front of a judge without having your lawsuit dismissed for lack of standing.

"The fact that the Biden administration made two swift changes to the program in response to these lawsuits—including a very substantial change in cutting FFELP debtors out of relief—suggests that they are not very confident that the courts would side with them on the question of whether the HEROES Act actually allows the executive to do a student debt forgiveness of this sort," he added. "So they are trying to avoid litigating that question by changing the program to undercut theories of standing that get presented in the courts."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Goroka town is under lockdown and remains tense as Papua New Guinea police mount a heavy presence following the brutal slaying of the PNG Ports chief executive Fego Kiniafa outside the Eastern Highlands provincial capital.

Kiniafa was slashed to death at Nagamiufa on Saturday after he allegedly shot a Nagamiufa man.

Four men who were with Kiniafa are alleged to have been taken hostage by Nagamiufa villagers.

• READ MORE: PNG Ports chief executive killed in Highlands fight

His relatives from Korofeigu, Lower Bena, are reported to have mobilised and attacked Nagamiufa village, sparking a tribal conflict that shut down businesses in Goroka and sent people scattering.

Highway travellers were left stranded as vehicles deserted the roads between Lower Bena and Goroka, and international visitors to the just ended Goroka Show were also stranded at the new airport.

Police reported the Lower Benas wiped out Nagamiufa village in a 4am dawn raid yesterday.

Most people had fled in fear of the attack to neighbouring villages.

Raid because of no arrest
The raid allegedly occurred because there has not been any arrest made in relation to the death of Kiniafa two days after he was slashed to death near Nagamiufa village.

Spears, guns and other weapons were used as Goroka town was deserted with businesses shut down and the Goroka General Hospital also on lockdown as security was tightened.

Travellers wishing to travel out of the province after the EHP show were left stranded and locked inside the terminal as the airport closed its gates.

On Saturday morning, Police Commissioner David Manning confirmed the death of Kiniafa, 43, from a confrontation near Nagamiufa village.

EHP Police Commander Chief Superintendent Michael Welly said that the killing occurred between midnight and 6am on September 17.

According to police reports, Kiniafa was allegedly involved in a confrontation with several suspects from the surrounding settlements around Nagamiufa village in Goroka.

Kiniafa allegedly shot another man, and in retaliation the relatives of the man ambushed Kiniafa and his driver with bush-knives, killing them.

Four men allegedly kidnapped
Superintendent Welly said: “It is alleged that four men who were with Mr Kiniafa are said to have been kidnapped as well with police investigating the allegations and as well as investigating the incident on Saturday.”

Kiniafa was found at the scene and rushed to the hospital before being pronounced dead on arrival.

PNG Ports on Saturday afternoon released a short statement confirming Kiniafa’s death and announcing that chief operations officer Rodney Begley would manage and oversee the office of the CEO.

Kimiafa, who turned 43 on PNG’s Independence Day — Friday, September 16 — was one of the youngest chief executives of a government entity.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Rep. Cori Bush sailed to a comfortable reelection Tuesday night, sending a message that St. Louis Democrats are happy with their nonconformist representative. Her victory marks a win for progressive incumbents in an election year that has seen them embattled by outside spending and little supported — if not outright opposed — by the party establishment. But progressives faltered statewide: In the open race for retiring Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt’s seat, populist-styled Lucas Kunce lost the primary to Trudy Busch Valentine, an heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune.

“They don’t like the fact that we don’t accept any corporate money. They don’t like that I speak the way that I speak because I came from this community and I sound like my community. They don’t love the fact that, instead of being what they call dignified, I show up as a protestor, that I’ve been on the frontlines forever,” Bush told the crowd at her election-night speech. “But our work isn’t based on what they like. Our work is based on what folks need.”

A former nurse and activist, Bush gained prominence locally as the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets in 2014, after Ferguson police shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Since her election to Congress in 2020, Bush has pursued a confrontational style of politics that has rallied activists but has often put her at odds with party leadership, becoming one of the only congressional Democrats willing to say “defund the police,” and bucking party leadership in a row over decoupling an infrastructure bill from a wider progressive agenda.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Austin Ahlman.

Nine suspects arrested over a barbaric machete attack on Sunday outside the counting venue at Port Moresby’s Sir John Guise Stadium have been labelled “innocent” and released this week from Papua New Guinean police custody at Waigani.

The act stirred up public fear, anxiety and created a lot of debate on the 2022 national general election in the National Capital District (NCD). It also got the attention of international media from the video circulated widely on social media showing a group of men chasing two men with bush knives, iron bars and other weapons and attacking them on the road at Waigani.

Reports from reliable security forces said that the nine suspects arrested behind Sports Inn, just next to Sir John Guise Stadium after discovery of bundle of knives inside their vehicle, had never taken part in the fight and were innocent.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the Port Moresby attack

Police picked them up after they ran down to their camp location fearful of being attacked by other candidate supporters following the fight that had erupted outside the counting venue.

Police said the men were all from Chimbu province, employed by a security firm, and the owner of the company was also an election candidate.

The bush knives discovered inside their vehicle belonged to the company.

The vehicle impounded by police is under investigation.

Marjorie Finkeo is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A company linked to the father of a Missouri Democratic congressional contender is funding a political action committee attacking his opponent, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

YACHAD PAC, a new committee spending against Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., in her upcoming primary challenge, is run by Republican operative Paul Zemitzsch, local news outlet KSDK reported Wednesday. The group has received contributions from former Democratic Rep. William Lacy Clay, whom Bush ousted in 2020; Clay’s sister; and his former director of communications. But the PAC’s recent FEC filings reveal that its primary funder is a company linked to the father of Bush’s opponent, state Sen. Steven Roberts Jr.

SCD Investments LLC, an investment group where Roberts’s father, Steven C. Roberts Sr., has held multiple titles, gave the PAC $16,000 in May. Roberts Sr. was previously listed in 2013 as the company’s member in Missouri public records and as its manager in a State of Florida filing. He was also the company’s registered agent until 2013. In the record of its donation to YACHAD PAC, the company lists an address shared by several Roberts family companies. Roberts Sr. did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

A brutal massacre in Porgera town yesterday afternoon in which 18 innocent people were killed has rocked Enga province and shocked Papua New Guinea.

Local police chief acting Superintendent George Kakas was shocked by the act of violence in the wake of the country’s national elections — he was left speechless when told by field officers about the killings.

Last night, caretaker Prime Minister James Marape said Porgera was now in a state of emergency.

• READ MORE: As Annaisha, 22, held her baby and waited to cast her vote, PNG police ‘switched their guns to auto’ and fired
• Other PNG election reports

“We have called out additional manpower from both the military and police, not just for Porgera but for other areas that need special assistance as well,” he said.

“We will beef up security as election requirements have diluted normal police work and the present killing is related to an ongoing tribal fight.”

In his policing career, Kakas has seen worse but yesterday’s act was one he thought was the work of a deranged mob who had no respect for the sanctity of life.

Of the 18 dead, 13 were men and 5 were women. They were going about their normal lives when men armed with machetes and axes hacked them to death.

Hour of wanton destruction
It was an hour of wanton destruction in which no one in the path of the rampaging tribesmen was spared, Kakas said.

Pictures of the dead posted online showed a trail of destruction with murderous intent. It seemed none of the dead had any chance of escaping.

In one picture, a woman clad in a PNG meri blouse lay next to a young girl, probably her daughter.

In another, a man and a woman lie side by side, having fallen where they were attacked.

The woman is on her knees, cowering in a foetal position, probably having begged for mercy — a futile attempt to evade the inevitable.

Men examining the scene looking for relatives were shown carrying bush knives and axes.

In turbulent Enga these are normal weapons.

Disputed gold mine
Porgera is the site of the disputed giant gold mine which has been closed for almost two years.

A violent tribal fight between the Aiyala and Nomali tribes has been raging, which has severely affected the elections in that part of the region.

The 18 deaths brings to 70 the number of people killed in Porgera in the past four months.

Although an emergency was declared in Porgera, the fighting between Aiyala and Nomali has continued, Superintendent Kakas said.

Security forces are present in Porgera Town. Together with local police, there are about 150 police and army personnel, however they are outnumbered by the tribal warriors, who are heavily armed.

“The 13 men and 5 women were killed in Paiam and Upper Porgera on Wednesday afternoon,” Kakas said.

Of the 18, five people were killed in Upper Porgera Station and 13 people killed at Paiam.

“Out of the 18 deaths, 3 men from Porgera town area were killed by Kandeps. This killing related to the ongoing tribal fight at Paiam has now escalated to Pogera Town.”

Troops moving in
“Police Commissioner David Manning said last night the PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) contribution troops for the task force were in the process of moving into Enga.

“There is no SOE declared, 120 soldiers from the 2nd PIR Bravo Company were sent in yesterday afternoon. They are based in Wabag and once all logistics are in place, they will further deploy to the electorates of Porgera, Laiagam, and Kompiam and join their RPNGC MS counterparts who are currently on the ground.”

Manning said the task force had 60 days to restore the rule of law in the electorates, secure the mine and provide protection for repairs to be done on damaged bridges –– especially on the Wabag-Kompiam road.

“We received reports of continuous killings in Porgera that began over the weekend. Priority deployment is to the Porgera valley, to quell the fighting between the local Porgereans and settlers from other parts of Enga Province,” he said.

“We have received urgent pleas to also evacuate non-Engans who currently work up there — for them to be escorted to safety.

“The 3 meter wide, 4-5 meter deep trench that was dug across the Surinki stretch of Wabag-Porgera road is still undergoing repairs. However, a temporary bypass has been constructed to allow traffic.”

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Rep. Cori Bush and Sen. Tina Smith introduced bicameral legislation Monday aimed at bolstering access to medication abortion as Republican-led states across the U.S. attempt to restrict distribution of the pills in their drive to ban abortion entirely.

If passed, the Protecting Access to Medication Abortion Act would codify into federal law the Food and Drug Administration's Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, one of two medications commonly used in tandem to end a pregnancy. In December, the FDA permanently lifted its requirement that mifepristone be administered in person, allowing patients to receive the medication through the mail.

"Extremist Republicans are attacking and undermining access to a safe and effective medication."

The new bill would also "ensure those seeking abortion care can always access medication abortion through telehealth and certified pharmacies, including mail-order pharmacies," according to a summary released by Bush's office.

While the U.S. Postal Service has said it won't actively help GOP-led states block access to medication abortion and the Biden administration has warned pharmacists against denying people access to the pills, news reports indicate that some patients have been turned away when seeking mifepristone and misoprostol in states that have banned abortion following the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

"Abortion care is healthcare and, therefore, a human right—period," Bush (D-Mo.) said in a statement. "While extremist anti-abortion lawmakers in states like Missouri use the recent decision made by the stolen Supreme Court to attack a person's right to bodily autonomy, I remain committed to ensuring everyone in this country can have access to an abortion—no matter where they live."

The high court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization prompted a surge of interest in abortion care via telemedicine, but sweeping state-level abortion bans enacted in recent weeks have raised questions about the legality of medication abortion and whether pregnant people will still be able to access the pills.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 19 U.S. states "require the clinician providing a medication abortion to be physically present when the medication is administered, thereby prohibiting the use of telemedicine to prescribe medication for abortion."

As ABC News reported earlier this month, "Some legal scholars believe that state restrictions on medication abortion are subject to preemption challenges—meaning that federal oversight of the drug trumps state laws."

"Because the FDA has approved and regulates mifepristone," the outlet explained, "it may not be lawful for states to ban it."

Some of the laws currently in place in Republican-led states are highly draconian. The Tampa Bay Times notes that "a physician who mails the medication to a Louisiana resident could face up to 10 years in prison and a $75,000 fine."

"A new law in Tennessee makes distributing abortion pills through the mail a felony punishable by up to $50,000 in fines," the Florida paper observes. "And South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recently called for a special legislative session to craft new laws barring the practice. A 2015 law prohibits Florida physicians from prescribing the medications without an in-person visit at least 24 hours in advance—effectively outlawing telehealth abortions."

Smith (D-Minn.), the only U.S. senator to have worked at Planned Parenthood, said Monday that "right now, extremist Republicans are attacking and undermining access to a safe and effective medication because they believe that the government—not women, not their healthcare providers—should control the healthcare that doctors provide women."

"We need to fight back against Republicans' ongoing efforts to chip away at women's reproductive freedoms," said Smith. "Our bill, which would safeguard access to medication abortion, is a critical step that would help protect what remaining access exists to reproductive healthcare."

In a one-pager outlining the new legislation—which faces an uphill battle in the U.S. Senate due to likely opposition from the GOP and at least one right-wing Democrat—Bush's office states that "extremist anti-abortion lawmakers are attacking access to medication abortion, and even going so far as to criminalize it."

"States have imposed restrictions that contradict scientific evidence," the document continues, "by requiring healthcare providers to be physically present when administering the drug to a patient, prohibiting medication abortion before 10 weeks gestation, or only allowing physicians—and not other healthcare professionals—to administer medication abortion."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

President Joe Biden's attempt to address the climate emergency through executive action received a potential boost this week from Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri and other Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.

Thanks to what The Intercept described as a "last-minute, behind-the-scenes effort by Bush," the fiscal year 2023 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies spending bill includes $100 million for the domestic manufacturing of clean energy. If approved, the new funding would give the president resources to accelerate the production of solar panels, heat pumps, and other green technologies.

As Republicans and corporate Democrats such as Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) continue to obstruct Biden's legislative agenda, progressive lawmakers have urged the White House to use its executive authority to the fullest possible extent to slash greenhouse gas pollution and deliver for working people. Earlier this month, Biden invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA), which enables the president to reorient U.S. manufacturing policy, to strengthen the domestic production of clean energy.

Senators from both major parties, including Manchin and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), "have also called on Biden to use the DPA to support green technology manufacturing," The Intercept reported Wednesday, "making passage into law, once the appropriations bill passes the House and is amended in the Senate, more likely."

"The new funding would strengthen the effectiveness of Biden's action and bolster precedent for using executive authority to fight the climate crisis," the news outlet noted. "The text of the provision gives Biden wide latitude in deciding how exactly to use the funds in support of those technologies, as is standard for policy created through the DPA."

"I am thrilled at the inclusion of $100 million in funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy through the Defense Production Act," Bush said Wednesday in a statement. "The DPA is one of the most important tools we have to take on high gas prices and the climate crisis at the same time."

"While fossil fuel CEOs continue to rake in outrageous profits and Russia's violent war on Ukraine continues, predominantly Black and brown communities like mine in St. Louis have been forced to the brink financially," the Missouri Democrat continued. "To protect all of our communities, particularly those with the greatest need, we must take robust measures to transition to renewable energy and lower prices as quickly as possible. This funding helps us achieve that."

The Sunrise Movement, meanwhile, tweeted: "This is a major win for communities demanding an end to fossil fuels. But we need to do more. We can fight back against the climate crisis only if President Biden takes even more executive action to protect our communities and the planet."

In a statement, the group's executive director Varshini Prakash said that "this moment calls for nothing less than a WWII-scale mobilization to justly transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030."

Funding for Biden's clean energy DPA order may not have materialized without Bush's leadership, as The Intercept reported:

While House leadership and the White House have been broadly supportive of the provision, Biden's latest invocation of the DPA left members of the House Appropriations Committee with little time to account for the new policy in ongoing negotiations. After individual Appropriations subcommittees receive their top-line figures, which in this case roughly coincided with Biden's announcement at the beginning of June, it is difficult to secure funding for new priorities. By coordinating discussions among the White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's [D-Calif.] office, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, Bush—a first-term representative—exerted a rare amount of influence over a process that is usually guided by senior members of the caucus.

In a press release marking the subcommittee's release of the draft bill, Kaptur touted the inclusion of the DPA funding, indicating that Bush's efforts have significant buy-in from key players in the appropriations process. "From unleashing energy innovation and utilizing the Defense Production Act to boost domestic manufacturing, to responsibly managing water resources and tackling the crisis of climate change—this Energy and Water bill delivers for America's needs in the 21st century," Kaptur said.

"This is awesome," Jamie Henn, co-founder of 350.org and director of Fossil Free Media, said of Bush securing $100 million for green energy. "Let's get more!"

Bush, for her part, said that this "vital funding is in line with" the Energy Security and Independence Act that she introduced in April alongside Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

"Advancing it through a committee markup," the progressive lawmaker pointed out, "is a necessary step in our efforts to foster communities that are truly energy secure."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Austin Ahlman.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dissident Voice Communications.

Photograph Source: David – CC BY 2.0

Death, remarked Gore Vidal about Truman Capote’s passing, was a good career move.  The novelist Saki also considered the good qualities of shuffling off the mortal coil.  “Waldo,” he writes in “The Feast of Nemesis”, “is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”  But what of those instances when death is foiled, the Grim Reaper cheated?

Former US President George W. Bush has had the good fortune of facing such a foiling, though the claims remain fresh.  On May 24, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi national living in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested and chargedwith aiding and abetting the attempted murder of a former US official and charges of attempting to bring foreign nationals to the US.  The nationals in question are said to be affiliated with the Islamic State group.

According to court documents, the FBI foiled the alleged plot through using informants.  In November last year, Shihab is said to have told one of them that he “wished to kill former President Bush because they felt that he was responsible for killing many Iraqis and breaking apart the entire country of Iraq.”

In subsequent discussions with the informants, Shihab is alleged to have said how he “wanted to be involved in the actual attack and assassination of former President Bush and did not care if he died as he would be proud to have been involved in killing former President Bush.”  One may fault the intended outcome, but the historical reasoning behind the motive is hard to rebut.

A statement from Bush’s chief of staff Freddy Ford had the former president expressing “all the confidence in the world in the United States Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities.”

This would have caused a gasp from those in the intelligence community so wilfully maligned in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.  The issue again surfaced in March 2019, when former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took to Twitter to wash his hands while dumping on those who had supplied the intelligence.  “There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years,” he began.  “After no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] were found, the left claimed ‘Bush lied.  People died.’  This accusation is a lie.  It’s time to put it to rest.”

Unconvincingly, Fleischer proceeded to shift and spread blame, claiming both he and Bush “faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded.” He implicated the CIA and other intelligence services, including those of Egypt, France and Israel.  “We all turned out to be wrong.  That is very different from lying.”

Bush’s role in the Iraq War was again appraised in his May 19 speech on election integrity, when he enlivened his gaffe-strewn legacy with a momentous Freudian slip or, as John Fugelsang described it, “a Freudian confession”.  In referring to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s “absence of checks and balances”, Bush had something of a coming out moment: “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq … I mean, of Ukraine.”  On realising his error, and no doubt hoping to strike a note of levity, he suggested, “Iraq, too” and pointing to age as an excuse (“Anyway, 75!”).

Guffawing followed and could only come across as ghoulishly telling about the predations of power and cant.  It was reminiscent of the light-hearted response to his cringeworthy performance at the 2004 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  While narrating a slideshow featuring a picture of himself peering under furniture in the Oval Office, Bush could not resist quipping: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.”

David Corn, writing at the time for The Nation, found little reason to be amused.  “Before an audience of people who supposedly spend their days pursuing the truth, Bush joked about misstatements (if not lies) he had used to persuade (if not hornswoggle) the American people and the media.”

The same could be said about the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, who refused to partake in the merriment, however nervously expressed, by the audience gathered at the Southern Methodist University.  “Freudian slip about past massacres (of other barbarians) amuses audience,” he tweeted gloomily.  “All is well in the settler colony.”

All is certainly well for Bush, who, as absent-minded dauber, has undergone a rapid rehabilitation as elder statesman. Little is mentioned these days of his culpable role in leading an invasion of a sovereign state that saw the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands, displacements, poisonings, and the destabilisation of the Middle East.  “When your guilty consciousness catch [sic] up with you and you end up confessing but no one cares to hold you to account,”observed Representative Ilhan Omar.

The Trump era aided the process of revision and cleansing, with traumatised Democrats and some notional progressives longing to return to the good times of the Bush imperium marked by illegal wars, warrantless surveillance and state sanctioned torture.

In 2019, Yale University, via a delegation of students who might have known better, bestowed upon Bush the Yale Undergraduate Lifetime Achievement Award.  The decision to select the former president as the recipient was drawn from a vote by over 1,000 students, suggesting that collective amnesia is rife.  In a statement, Bush acknowledged the role played by the university in shaping him, expressing pride in joining the ranks of Anderson Cooper, Maya Lin and Jodie Foster, concluding with the triumphant, “Boola Boola!”

With Shihab’s arrest, Bush can draw upon a well of sympathy by claiming that Freedom’s Land had, at the very least, a president worthy of being the target of an alleged assassination plot.  But in prosecuting a man nursing a grievance over the role played by Bush in perpetrating the destruction of his homeland, another brutal invasion will receive some renewed attention, if only briefly.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Former US President George W. Bush has had the good fortune of facing such a foiling, though the claims remain fresh.  On May 24, Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi national living in Columbus, Ohio, was arrested and charged with aiding and abetting the attempted murder of a former US official and charges of attempting to bring foreign nationals to the US.  The nationals in question are said to be affiliated with the Islamic State group.

According to court documents, the FBI foiled the alleged plot through using informants.  In November last year, Shihab is said to have told one of them that he “wished to kill former President Bush because they felt that he was responsible for killing many Iraqis and breaking apart the entire country of Iraq.”

In subsequent discussions with the informants, Shihab is alleged to have said how he “wanted to be involved in the actual attack and assassination of former President Bush and did not care if he died as he would be proud to have been involved in killing former President Bush.”  One may fault the intended outcome, but the historical reasoning behind the motive is hard to rebut.

A statement from Bush’s chief of staff Freddy Ford had the former president expressing “all the confidence in the world in the United States Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities.”

This would have caused a gasp from those in the intelligence community so wilfully maligned in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.  The issue again surfaced in March 2019, when former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took to Twitter to wash his hands while dumping on those who had supplied the intelligence.  “There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years,” he began.  “After no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] were found, the left claimed ‘Bush lied.  People died.’  This accusation is a lie.  It’s time to put it to rest.”

Unconvincingly, Fleischer proceeded to shift and spread blame, claiming both he and Bush “faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded.” He implicated the CIA and other intelligence services, including those of Egypt, France and Israel.  “We all turned out to be wrong.  That is very different from lying.”

Bush’s role in the Iraq War was again appraised in his May 19 speech on election integrity, when he enlivened his gaffe-strewn legacy with a momentous Freudian slip or, as John Fugelsang described it, “a Freudian confession”.  In referring to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s “absence of checks and balances”, Bush had something of a coming out moment: “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq … I mean, of Ukraine.”  On realising his error, and no doubt hoping to strike a note of levity, he suggested, “Iraq, too” and pointing to age as an excuse (“Anyway, 75!”).

Guffawing followed and could only come across as ghoulishly telling about the predations of power and cant.  It was reminiscent of the light-hearted response to his cringeworthy performance at the 2004 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  While narrating a slideshow featuring a picture of himself peering under furniture in the Oval Office, Bush could not resist quipping: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.”

David Corn, writing at the time for The Nation, found little reason to be amused.  “Before an audience of people who supposedly spend their days pursuing the truth, Bush joked about misstatements (if not lies) he had used to persuade (if not hornswoggle) the American people and the media.”

The same could be said about the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, who refused to partake in the merriment, however nervously expressed, by the audience gathered at the Southern Methodist University.  “Freudian slip about past massacres (of other barbarians) amuses audience,” he tweeted gloomily.  “All is well in the settler colony.”

All is certainly well for Bush, who, as absent-minded dauber, has undergone a rapid rehabilitation as elder statesman.  Little is mentioned these days of his culpable role in leading an invasion of a sovereign state that saw the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands, displacements, poisonings, and the destabilisation of the Middle East.  “When your guilty consciousness catch [sic] up with you and you end up confessing but no one cares to hold you to account,” observed Representative Ilhan Omar.

The Trump era aided the process of revision and cleansing, with traumatised Democrats and some notional progressives longing to return to the good times of the Bush imperium marked by illegal wars, warrantless surveillance and state sanctioned torture.

In 2019, Yale University, via a delegation of students who might have known better, bestowed upon Bush the Yale Undergraduate Lifetime Achievement Award.  The decision to select the former president as the recipient was drawn from a vote by over 1,000 students, suggesting that collective amnesia is rife.  In a statement, Bush acknowledged the role played by the university in shaping him, expressing pride in joining the ranks of Anderson Cooper, Maya Lin and Jodie Foster, concluding with the triumphant, “Boola Boola!”

With Shihab’s arrest, Bush can draw upon a well of sympathy by claiming that Freedom’s Land had, at the very least, a president worthy of being the target of an alleged assassination plot.  But in prosecuting a man nursing a grievance over the role played by Bush in perpetrating the destruction of his homeland, another brutal invasion will receive some renewed attention, if only briefly.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Everyone has by now heard about the latest gaffe by former United States president and unconvicted war criminal George W Bush, father of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and other fantastically bloody escapades.

Bush and his audience, on the other hand, are by virtue of imperial entitlement permitted to snicker at a reference to the mass slaughter of nonwhite non-Westerners as though it were merely an instance of self-deprecating humour.

In a recent speech at his very own George W Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas, Texas, Bush condemned the "absence of checks and balances" in Vladimir Putin's Russia, which had enabled "one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq."

Quickly realising his not-really-mistake, Bush corrected himself: "I mean, of Ukraine"—but added slightly under his breath: "Iraq, too, anyway." The spectacle elicited gleeful laughter from the audience, as did Bush's subsequent attribution of the Iraq-Ukraine mix-up to his age: "Seventy-five".

Granted, the linguistically challenged ex-head of state has long made people chuckle with his so-called "Bushisms," which have over the years included the following peculiar utterances: "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully"; "They misunderestimated me;" and "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"

But the effective annihilation of a nation is hardly a laughing matter. Ditto for the reduction to a split-second "Iraq, too, anyway" of hundreds of thousands of deaths, countless massacres of Iraqi civilians, the forcible displacement of millions of people, and the saturation of the country with toxic and radioactive munitions that continue to cause congenital birth defects, cancer, and all manner of other maladies nearly two decades after the launch of the "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion".

One can imagine the horror that would ensue were a nonwhite non-Westerner to crack a joke about, say, the September 11 attacks, or some other event paling in comparison—in terms of human and material destruction—to the war on Iraq. Bush and his audience, on the other hand, are by virtue of imperial entitlement permitted to snicker at a reference to the mass slaughter of nonwhite non-Westerners as though it were merely an instance of self-deprecating humour on the part of the former imperial commander-in-chief.

Of course, this is not the first time Bush has unintentionally said something deeply revealing about his own belligerence. There was that time in 2006, for example, when he remarked in an interview with CBS Evening News: "You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror".

Nor, it so happens, is it the first time that he has joked about the whole premise of the Iraq war. Back in 2004, during the annual cringe-fest known as the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Bush narrated a slide show featuring a picture of him looking under furniture in the Oval Office: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere," he quipped to applause and laughter.

This, mind you, was just one year after the launch of a war that was supposedly meant to save the world from the apocalyptic threat of Iraq's alleged WMD arsenal. In an April 2004 dispatch for The Nation, titled Laughing With Bush, David Corn—then the magazine's Washington editor—called out the president for his Correspondents' Dinner "performance" and the attendees for their ingratiating response.

In front of an "audience of people who supposedly spend their days pursuing the truth", Corn wrote, "Bush joked about misstatements (if not lies) he had used to persuade (if not hornswoggle) the American people and the media."

In other words, the entire situation was itself a joke—albeit not at all funny.

The Correspondents' Dinner has also played host to other bouts of presidential humour-that-wasn't—including in 2010 when then-president Barack Obama undertook to announce that members of the Jonas Brothers band were in attendance at the venue and that his daughters Sasha and Malia were "huge fans."

Obama continued: "But boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming." After pausing to allow for laughter and applause, the president received even more giggles with the line: "You think I'm joking".

Never mind that US military drones were then, as now, notoriously associated with the indiscriminate killing of civilians in various foreign lands. In the end, these presidential punchlines achieve the sort of barbarity disguised as banality that reflexively tickles America's funny bone.

Meanwhile, despite the perennial hullaballoo surrounding the threat of weapons of mass destruction, US leaders often seem to find the very concept of mass destruction downright hilarious. Recall that morning in August 1984 when Ronald Reagan went into jokester mode for the microphone check preceding his live radio broadcast: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes".

US allies, too, share a similar sense of humour and would-be wit—not to mention microphone issues. In July 2006, during the G8 conference in none other than Russia, an unattended microphone captured the banter between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his faithful accomplice in the quest to obliterate Iraq.

It was less than a week into the latest effort by Israel—another imperial accomplice—to obliterate Lebanon via a 34-day bombing campaign that ultimately killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians. Bush addressed his counterpart as: "Yo, Blair", and, according to the transcript of the chat on the BBC website, the pair had a good laugh over the important matter of a sweater Blair had gifted Bush:

Bush: "I know you picked it out yourself."

Blair: "Oh absolutely—in fact, I knitted it!"

The duo then proceeded to discuss the bloodshed in Lebanon, which in Bush's view could be resolved not by getting Israel to stop massacring people but rather by getting Lebanon's Hezbollah organisation—which, logically, was fighting back—"to stop doing this s***."

Fast forward to the 2022 Iraq-I-mean-Ukraine gaffe at the George W Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas—the "wholly unjustified and brutal" decimation of a country condensed into a single imperial wisecrack—and one finds oneself wishing that it would all just stop.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Belén Fernández.

Former President George W. Bush on Wednesday inadvertently condemned "the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq" as he delivered remarks criticizing Russia's assault on Ukraine.

"Nothing will erase the memory of war criminal George W. Bush laughing—yes, laughing—about his grievously apt slip of the tongue."

Recognizing the slip, Bush—who in his memoir described the catastrophic Iraq invasion, which he launched in 2003 under false pretenses, as "eternally right"—quickly brushed it off with a chuckle and blamed his age.

"I mean of Ukraine," Bush told an audience gathered in Dallas. "Iraq, too. Anyway. Seventy-five."

Much of the crowd appeared to get a kick out of the 43rd president's blunder, laughing as he moved on with his speech.

"I'm not laughing," Mehdi Hasan said in a brief MSNBC segment Wednesday night. "I am guessing nor are the families of the thousands of American troops and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in that war."

Journalists, activists, researchers, and ordinary Iraqis have struggled for years to document and articulate the horrifying extent of the destruction caused by the invasion, which the Bush administration carried out with the approval of both chambers of Congress.

Death toll estimates vary widely—ranging from hundreds of thousands to more than a million—and countless Iraqis were wounded and displaced by the invasion and accompanying bombing campaigns, which have had lasting effects on the country and its people. Thousands of U.S. troops are still in Iraq, nearly two decades later.

"Stuff happens!" Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's defense secretary, said flippantly in April 2003 as reports of mass chaos and civilian deaths rolled in. "And it's untidy. And freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes. And commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things and that’s what's gonna happen here."

Bush, Rumsfeld, and other members of the administration have been called war criminals over the invasion and occupation, a label that observers repeated in response to the former president's comments Wednesday.

Spencer Ackerman, a journalist who has reported from Iraq, wrote on Twitter late Wednesday that "it's hard to get past the nihilistic evil of killing hundreds of thousands, making millions into refugees, and turning it into stand-up to defuse the awkwardness of your hypocrisy."

The peace group CodePink added that "nothing will erase the memory of war criminal George W. Bush laughing—yes, laughing—about his grievously apt slip of the tongue."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

"Invasion" read the headlines in our newspapers.

19 years ago in March 2002, it was the US invading Iraq.

Today it's Russia invading Ukraine. The stupidity of it all.

When you heard President Biden today, February 24, 2022, speaking about Russia invading Ukraine, you could've substituted the words US and Iraq.

It's the same stupidity.

Here we are 19 years later and Russia does not care about international outrage of their invasion of Ukraine just as the United States did not care about millions of people all over the world walking, marching, and protesting against the US war on Iraq.

The world is faced with government leaders who still don't care that war does not resolve the issues of concern and are willing to sacrifice the lives of young men and women in their military as well as the lives of young and old men and women and tens of thousands of children in the countries they invade.

These leaders are willing to endure years of "insurgencies" (Afghanistan, Iraq) in the countries they invade. They are willing to see cities destroyed (Fallujah). They are willing to use assassin drones, bunker busters, Mother of all Bombs, hypersonic missiles and crow about how proud they are that these weapons are "selective" and kill very few civilians. 

The leaders just don't care and feed off the "successes" of others that commit illegal wars and get away with it.

In Russia protesters against the war are already being arrested and hauled off to jail and threatened with criminal records. On the first day of the invasion of Ukraine, over 1600 Russians have been arrested.

19 years ago men and women protested the U.S. war on Iraq in cities around the United States and were arrested, thrown into jails and warehouses and left for days.

19 years ago I resigned as a US diplomat from the US government in opposition to the US war on Iraq. I imagine there are probably some diplomats in Russia that are considering resignation. 

I believed that the Bush administration's rationale of war was to secure alleged weapons of mass destruction was wrong. In the United Nations, countries refused to authorize the U.S. war on Iraq.

I'm sure many of the Russian diplomats recognize that Russian recognition of the provinces of Ukraine as independent regions is opposed by many governments as expressed in United Nations debates.

The citizens of the United States and citizens of Russia don't want war.

However we keep having leaders that seem to think they can get away with war and they do!

What do we as citizens do to stop this war madness? 

Be careful of whom we elect as our leader.

Push back against political demonization of other countries. 

Voice our outrage in the media, if you can get a platform.

Hit the streets with signs and banners with our concern so leaders and media see visible opposition to war.

Do not accept war as the answer to any dispute.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Ann Wright.

African Americans must learn the truth about socialism that they may preserve their culture, get rid of poverty, ignorance and disease, and help America live up at least to a shadow of its vain boast as the land of the free and the home of the brave.
— W.E.B DuBois

The Message is the Truth!

He who controls the media, controls the world. And with media, that is everything — curriculum design, product manuals, white papers, legislative treatises, novels, history books, magazines, on-line, off-line, textbooks, music, film, TV, the entire ranch, including The Press.

It was early when I got into Gannett papers, Pulitzer owned papers, small town mom and pop “chains, LA Times Syndicate, and others. Chilling, really, the naivete I had as a J student in Tucson, working the Arizona Daily Wildcat and other lab papers. Seems like I thought I was a warrior for truth, and that was on occasion true, but in the end, the powers that be in big or small locales control the message because the newspaper owners and editors usually are embedded in the community: Chamber of Commerce, School Board, Rotary, Knights of Columbus, and more.

There is not much freedom, and you better get the quotes right, and you better not pry too much around the edges.

No more competing newspapers in small towns. No more weeklies. No more radical and hokum papers. There are no more papers. Well, a few, but in this Zoom scroll world, and this antisocial shit storm of the social networks (sic), we have pretty threadbare conversations. Digital stories are worthless for that, getting the juices flowing. It’s all curated and personalized, these digital platforms and news aggregators; and there is just so much shit out there on the Internet the quagmire is part of the lesson plan and lessons learned — no one is right. Bullshit. Some great sources, in the digital world, but they are read by a few hundred, maybe a thousand or so. Writing rants in the comments sections, well, not sure the impact that has on anything other than ego building and endless criticism. There are a million know-it-all’s out there for every decent piece of news or feature.

But reading ain’t enough, since we need robust parsing and discourse, and exactly what it is we are asked to read and comprehend and take hook, line and sinker, as the prevailing truths of our time, or the situational truths of our day.

It is A Sickness: Shifting Baseline Disorder/Disease?

So much shifting baseline disorder, and so many truths lifting and tossed and remixed. Without education, that is, table and coffee talk, what have, it is a one-way line of communication. Even these little rants need some feedback, or better yet, discourse. Ain’t gunna happen. Here, today, on Democracy Now:

And this is something that the AP and other news organizations really need to think about. Who are we going to let work in our newsrooms? How are we going to deal with — I mean, if you have, for example, a whole generation of students who went to Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and then they come and take my journalism class at Stanford or another university, and they say, “You know what? I want to be a journalist,” and their lives live on TikTok and Instagram and all that, are all these journalists not — are these students not going to be able to be journalists now? I mean, are there not top managers in news organizations who were in anti-Vietnam protests in the ’60s, and their lives live on in Instagram?

Or is this specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Which, as you noted, the coverage is shifted the very week that Emily got caught up in this. You had the bombing of the AP bureau in Gaza. You had a very visceral reaction by the American public to the Israeli attacks in Gaza, in a way that you did not have in 2014 when 2,200 Palestinians were killed. You didn’t see this kind of reaction. You had, on the A1 of The New York Times on Sunday, a story about the brutality of life under Israeli occupation. These are all very unusual. Look on The New York Times today in terms of a letter from Gaza that really calls into question a lot of the Israeli narrative about Hamas and what’s really happening in Gaza. I mean, there’s just — there’s a major shift going on.

— Stanford journalism professor Janine Zacharia, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for the Washington Post

You Can’t Talk about this in Polite Company!

To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures antisemitism freakout. Grayzone.

Mark Ruffalo apologizes for posts on Israel: ‘It’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify antisemitism’

Emily Wilder’s Firing Is No Surprise: AP Has Always Been Right-Wing — Source.

On February 10, Abby Martin filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Georgia law requiring all independent contractors to sign a pro-Israel pledge, promising to not participate or advocate the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israeli crimes.

The death knell is talking critically about “Israel,” man. Line up those rusty three-penny nails and hammer truth away in a pine coffin. Facts don’t matter. The up is down, war is peace, lies are truth mentality and propaganda, that is on overdrive with the Zionists especially, those here, there, and in other parts of the world, like UK and Australia. Forget Canada!

Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

— Chris  Hedges in his recent commentary, “Israel, the Big Lie” for ScheerPost

To Boycott or Not to Boycott?

Well, that is not the question. Really, when I was working for the University of Texas in El Paso, there was a loyalty oath to the Texas Constitution. Basically, you sign a state statute disqualifying for government employment persons who advocate the overthrow of government by force or violence or persons who were members of organizations that so advocated; the statute had been supplemented by a provision applicable to teachers calling for the drawing up of a list of organizations that advocated violent overthrow and making membership in any listed organization prima facie evidence of disqualification.

No Sign, No Job. Or, for a measly adjunct with no union (as if teacher’s unions do squat for the rank and file), you attempt to push the illogic of a loyalty oath to the state’s constitution, etc., when, in fact, much of what some teachers do IS tied to groups the prevailing neoliberal, neocon, conservative consider as dissident, adversarial, contrary to the American/Texan way, etc. That was me for much of my 18 years, on and off, in El Paso.

Of course, those corrupt and syphilitic judges pushing state loyalty oaths, and loyalty ones for apartheid and murderous Israel, they come back like this in their legal opinions:  “If they do not choose to work on such terms, they are at liberty to retain their beliefs and associations and go elsewhere. Has the State thus deprived them of any right to free speech or assembly? We think not.”

A state could also deny employment based on a person’s “advocacy of overthrow” of the government by force or violence or based on unexplained membership in an organization so advocating with knowledge of the advocacy.

We already are behind the eight ball, as in these shit hole right to work (sic) states (read: anti union, anti worker rights, the right to get fired for no reason, thank you very much, mister, clean out your desk, and you have 10 minutes to leave the facility/office/warehouse/yard).

I’ve been escorted out of several workplaces with an hour’s notice, and these purveyors are wicked people, don’t let their PC and Cancel Culture and LGBTQAI+ spiels fool you.

Cancelling Your Subscription to Critical Thinking

Oh, so many ways that Tricky Shithead Force of Authority can wrangle “communist/radical/anarchist/Antifa/ ecoterrorist/antigovernment malcontent/fomenter of overthrow” out of this or that group or essay or membership into what would be now, terrorism. I was in Governor George W. Bush Country when it shifted — loyalty oath was required now of teachers, college adjuncts, what have you. “To honor, protect, defend and hold high the constitution of Texas . . . . ” El Paso may have voted straight democratic ticket, but many of the people in my circle who were artists, Chicanos, radicals outside that two-party system, but still voting for the lesser of two evils, always the democrat. Then, put in a large chunk of Latinx (mostly Mexicans and Mexican-Americans) who follow the Pope and indeed enlist in the military, well, we do have that conundrum of conservative “Hispanics.”

There really is no great place for a two-bit person — teaching hundreds of students at a time, in different schools or locations — to live. I was the Freeway Flyer, but in effect, now, before the lockdown and Zoom Rooms, 80 percent of all faculty are adjunct — just-in-time, precarious, at-will, 11th-hour, unprotected, un-benefited faculty.

That job is already fraught with landmines — bad department chairs, bad deans, asshole tenured faculty, bad unions, no unions, basic inhumane conditions in terms of teaching: no office, no health care, no nothing. That’s low wages, man — $6 an hour, $15, up to $18 (maybe).

Try being a creative teacher (I’ve written this a million times), and alas, scrutiny after scrutiny you find yourself in the public domain, even as a small fry. I was in the two newspapers all the time because I was working as a journalist, and I was not afraid of opinion pieces leveled against Empire, Powers, Administrators and the like.

Target after target are what I got plastered on my two-bit back. Hell, two-bit (no superstar teacher, shitty little articles, shitty little literary journals, shitty little everything in the eyes of the Capitalist Hierarchical Heathens) sometime feels like the world is against you, and other times, it seems as if the world could give squat what happens to you. That is the freedom, I guess — to never be noticed, read or consider an enemy of any “state.”

Above, that is, the story about Associated Press, it is no world of stopping the presses, so to speak. In terms of AP, well, a good piece over at the billionaire’s Intercept on that. Read:

“From its founding during the Mexican-American War to its reporting on Latin America today, AP’s always been quietly conservative” by Jon Schwartz.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS has received an enormous amount of criticism, including from its own staffers, for firing Emily Wilder, 22, after hiring her as a news associate just 17 days before. According to AP, Wilder was let go for “violations of AP’s social media policy.” AP’s action was clearly in response to a right-wing pressure campaign targeting Wilder for her activism in college supporting Palestinian rights.

[…]

AP’s conservatism continued for the rest of the century. Seymour Hersh, who worked for AP from 1962 to 1967, later said editors there were “timid on Vietnam” and that he could not have written his 1970 exposé of the My Lai Massacre for the wire service. In 1984, at a time of great fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan “joked” before a radio address that “I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” An AP reporter filed an article on this, but editors didn’t publish it — until other news outlets ran the story. That same year, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger asked AP not to run what it knew about the launch of a military satellite. AP happily obeyed.

I worked on stories for the AP a long time ago, and had friends who were employed by the AP. Absolutely, covering Southeast Arizona, the border, the militarized border, and such, I ran into editors on the newspapers that employed me who were scared shitless because their small town owners were also scared shitless capitalists. Amazing, any balance, really, to the other side of the border repression, or the outright thuggery of the officials, well, that was chopped out. My buddies with the AP, well, mostly culled stories, or at least parsed to nothing!

No Competing Narratives Allowed!

The price you pay for arguing is no job. Loyalty oath to the Constitution of Texas? There were some of us protesting, and I think I just signed on the dotted line, Paula Abdulla, quickly and sloppily, and while I didn’t put down my real John Hancock, it still felt like a cop-out. Paula Abdulla has been a signature I have used over the years. Each one is a bit different, and I have perfected the signature to not contain any resemblance to my real signature.

The outcry, and the protests, sure, maybe they did something, and my own pathetic personal deceptive signature may have felt good, but in the end, This is Not My/Our House.

So many of my African-American brothers and sisters have repeatedly stated, as we worked in these nonprofit (poverty pimps) jobs, that when the supervisors plied their unethical, ill-mannered, rotten tools to subjugate professional social services professionals, and I railed, always, and I always got sacked, the rejoinder was from my Black brothers and sisters,  “This is not your house, Paul.” Not because of my skin color, because I am white, but because of my anti-Imperial, anti-authority, and oppositional defiance to the managers’ and overlords’ consistent and corrupting misjustice, and maladjusted injustice, all of what their hierarchies create in capitalism, I criticized/criticize.

Oh, then there are the multimillionaires, the Mark Ruffalo’s of the world. Imagine, the fear of losing films, man, for making a TRUE statement about Israel as an Apartheid State and a Genocidal Fanatical Religious State.

Any number of “projects” this Ruffalo multimillionaire hawks, well, this is the stuff of his backbone — fear of losing to the Israel Lobby.

The story dramatizes Robert Bilott’s case against the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont after they contaminated a town with unregulated chemicals. It stars Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, along with Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, William Jackson Harper, and Bill Pullman.

Now, well, many Jewish writers have stated, “Of course, Jews run Hollywood.” I’m thinking about the early 2000s. Now, Google states:

Mea Culpa, Holly-Dirt!

Of course, Oliver Stone also had to apologize —

During a Television Critic Association panel on his 10-hour television Showtime documentary A Secret History of America in January, Stone got started with this little ditty: “Hitler was an easy scapegoat.”

This weekend he amped it up a notch. The controversial director complained to the London Sunday Times of “Jewish domination of the media” and claimed that Hitler did more damage to Russia than he did to the Jews.

Stone, who is half-Jewish, told the Times: “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f—ed up United States foreign policy for years.”

While “Hitler was a Frankenstein [monster],” Stone said, “there was also a Dr. Frankenstein: German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

Stone continued: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million [killed].”

It is the most bizarre and conspiratorial thing of our times, no, the fact that Jews were the heads of the major Hollywood studios, yet what Stone stated was, well, wrong! And he too grovels, and apologizes for stating his opinion, or deploying his First Amendment rights.

The complex web of interactions between Hollywood and the German government in the decade before the War reveals quite a different story – one not of antifascism but of “collaboration” [“Zusammenarbeit”]. The studios agreed not to attack the Nazis in any of their productions, and in return American movies were permitted in Germany, even potentially threatening ones like King Kong. At the same time – and this was a result less of the direct arrangement between the two groups than of a much deeper shared understanding – the American studios eliminated Jewish characters from the screen entirely. For seven years, the studios put out movies that were unobjectionable and sometimes even beneficial from the Nazi standpoint, and as a result they were able to continue doing business with Germany. (Source).

—Hitler and Hollywood: The Collaboration of American Movie Studios with Nazi Germany
By Benjamin Alexander Urwand

From the book:

The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream.  Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.

That is the gigantic sticky wicket, no, that we have Hollywood invented by Jews, but, well, Jews Don’t Run Hollywood. Then, there are those Jews who write about how Jews Run the Media, too — media being a plural, including books, music, film, TV, radio, marketing, what have you, including The Press.

Well, there could be some .001 percenters in the financial world, billionaire class, white men, mostly, and some are Goy and others Jewish. That’s just fact.

Jews are estimated to make up less than 1.4% of the world’s population, yet approximately 25% of the world’s billionaires. Even the Times of Israel states this:

Forbes published its 2018 roster of America’s wealthiest this week, and five members of the tribe made the top 10 list.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leads the Jewish pack at number 4, with a net worth of $61 billion. He is followed by software giant Oracle’s Larry Ellison at #5 with $58.4b and Google co-founder Larry Page at #6 with $53.8b.

Fellow co-founder Sergey Brin falls a bit behind with $52.4b, leaving him at #9. Finally, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg closes out the top 10 with a respectable $51.8b.

“5 Jews make Forbes’ list of top 10 wealthiest Americans“

Ahh, Oy Vey —

We Can Always Rewrite a Murder Conviction into Self-Defense, those little Bastard Babies!

You can have your cake and eat it too! But no matter how you spin it, please find movies out of Hollywood or distributed or acted in by big names that might, oh, look at the rampant racism, indoctrination of, and apartheid loving Jewish man or woman, or child, in Israel. Think about that, uh, a movie script that shows one of the IDF pilots refusing to bomb Gaza. You think there might be a Netflix or Hulu series on that, how the family is not split in half, but just one son, a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, refuses to bomb Gaza. Imagine those dinner table conversations. Nah, not on Netflix.

Listen to Dan Cohen and Miko Peled talk about how indoctrinated Jews are in Israel. This is what you need to know about an entire people destroyed by agency, and free thought:

Or Norman Finkelstein —

And then the question is: Why? And I think the answer is: Because, whether one likes it or not, Benjamin Netanyahu is the true face of Israel. He’s an obnoxious, loudmouth, racist, Jewish supremacist. And that’s the whole population now. Now, I’m saying it’s in their DNA. I’m not saying it’s genetic. But it is a very sorry thing that the state of Israel has degenerated into. And that—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s clearly not the entire population. You have so many critics. You have a peace movement there.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, no, I would say—you know, Amy, I would wish that were the case. I would wish that were the case. But if you ask the critics themselves, if you ask a Gideon Levy, you ask an Amira Hass, you ask a—

AMY GOODMAN: Who write for Haaretz.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Right—you ask B’Tselem, you ask—

AMY GOODMAN: The human rights group.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Right—Breaking the Silence, the soldiers’ group, they’ll tell you they represent nobody. They’ll tell you they don’t represent anymore. There was a period where they represented at least a factor in Israeli life. But it’s no longer true. And the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu endures, despite the succession of scandals, is a manifestation of how much that society has degenerated.

So, Gideon Levy, I think, the columnist, he made a comment the other day which I found very interesting. He said, the Israelis, they see a fellow in a wheelchair—he lost both his legs—in Gaza. He’s holding a flag. They shoot him right between the eyes, a sharpshooter. Everybody sees it on video. He says, no Israelis cared. Then another kid is killed. In this case, the second case, a kid is killed. A third is killed. Nobody cares. One thing they care about: The young girl, Ahed Tamimi, smacked an Israeli soldier. That causes hysteria. How dare a Palestinian smack an Israeli soldier? But the daily atrocities— Source.

Of course, by highlighting these statements, all of this, well, in the minds of racists, it’s antisemitism.

How much bearing witness do we go through?

Storytelling 101 — Only A Chosen Few Tell Our Stories

You think there are any dramatizations of that situation? Sure, come on, what about the Family known as, the Glosser Family:

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

Will there be a totally interesting Netflix Original or Amazon Studies flick on that Stephen Miller dynamic family life, and the variations on a theme of how many Jews are racists, not just some Miller-Trump aberration. We can have Norman Lear with Archie Bunker and all of that in that family, but, what about the Miller-Glosser All About Apartheid series?

Many of us wonder how it is the stories of the “other people” get told through the eyes of the White American or European scriptwriter or producer or director or novelist? Come on. Look at the films and documentaries, and look at the credits and follow the money, the Ivy League, the East Coast chosen ones.

That quote from above is from Miller’s uncle’s short piece, and you never-ever see any mention of the border wall, the economic strangulation, the eye, knee, torso shooting. No mention of the apartheid state and the daily international laws of humanity broken by Israel, and the chosen people:  It would be a perfect piece to broach that topic, since Miller and Trump love what Israel does to Palestine. But He doesn’t do it, Mr. Glosser.

— “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out” by David S. Glosser

Here, more of that chosen people, and their amazing PR bombs, הַסְבָּרָה

‎(Hasbara is a form of propaganda aimed at an international audience, primarily, but not exclusively, in western countries. It is meant to influence the conversation in a way that positively portrays Israeli political moves and policies, including actions undertaken by Israel in the past. Often, Hasbara efforts includes a negative portrayal of the Arabs and especially of Palestinians.)

The Israel lobby’s latest blitz of antisemitism allegations has successfully deflected US media’s attention away from Israel’s deliberate bombing of civilian towers and extermination of entire families in Gaza, the pogroms Jewish extremists waged against Palestinians just minutes from Tel Aviv, and the ongoing police round-up of Palestinian citizens of Israel. In turn, it has cast an American Jewish community basking in almost unimaginable affluence and privilege as the true victims of the Israel-Palestine crisis, while impugning a movement agitating for the rights of a dispossessed and colonized people as bigoted criminals.

—Max Blumenthal

Shifting Baselines — Oh, the Marketing, Man, Mad Men, Women, LGBTQIA+

• Free beer and a hot dog: Across US, incentives push to get holdouts vaccinated against COVID-19
• States are getting creative with vaccine incentives. In Kentucky, you can win up to $225K
• $1m in Ohio. $100 savings bonds in West Virginia. How incentives could improve the vaccination rate
• Want tickets to the Super Bowl or a seven-day cruise? Get vaccinated at CVS

Some of the recipients of a Michigan marijuana dispensary’s “Pot for Shots” scheme

Oh, those were the days, uh, lifting the Black power salute in Mexico City, and, well, banned for life. May Lee Evans R.I.P.

Lee Evans, an African American sprinter who helped found the Olympic Project for Human Rights after leading protests against racism in the United States, has died in Nigeria at the age of 74. Lee Evans won two gold medals while setting world records in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

His victories came just days after John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in the Black Power salute as the U.S. national anthem played during an awards ceremony. Carlos and Smith were suspended from the U.S. team and would later be banned for life from the Olympics for their protest in support of Black lives. Just two days later, Lee Evans wore a black beret and raised his fist in a similar protest, after winning a gold medal in the 400-meter dash.

Harry Edwards, who co-founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights, said, “Lee Evans was one of the greatest athletes and social justice advocates in an era that produced a generation of such courageous, committed and contributing athlete-activists.” (Source)

Oh, that fucking Olympics — one continuing criminal enterprise. Maybe several thousand students and others murdered, beginning in July, 1968, with the October 2, 1968 massacre, 10 days before the Olympic games were to begin in Mexico City. Police and army thugs fired on thousands of demonstrators. Hundreds were killed, thousands were beaten and jailed, and the government did its best to sweep the incident under the rug. No boycott there, uh?

Memory of Tlatelolco
by Rosario Castellanos

And who saw that brief, vivid flash of light?
Who is the one who kills?
Who are the ones who breathe their last; who die?
Who are the ones fleeing without their shoes?
Who are the ones belonging to the deep well of jails?
Who are the ones rotting in hospital?
Who are the ones struck dumb, forever, with horror?
Who? Who are the ones? Nobody. The next morning, nobody.
They found the square was swept clean. The front pages of the newspapers were full of the state of the weather. And on the television, on the radio, in the cinema, there was no change of programming, no special announcement. Not any meaningful silence in the midst of the banquet, because the banquet went on.
Don’t look for what isn’t there: traces, bodies, it’s all been given as an offering to a goddess, the Great Devourer of Excrement…
There are no official records.
Yet the fact is I can touch a wound.
In my memory it hurts, therefore it’s true.
I remember. We remember.
That’s our way of helping the very brave on so many a stained mind…
I remember.
Let’s all remember until justice becomes clear among us.

Rosario Castellanos (May 25, 1925 – August 7, 1974) was a Mexican poet and author.

Now those Tokyo Olympics, to be cancelled  or not to be cancelled, because of coronavirus SARS-CoV2? Contractual law, right, and the message is Covid-19, super spreader event, those 100 yard dashes?

JULES BOYKOFF: Each time an Olympic host city gets ready to start the games, they need to sign a host city contract with the International Olympic Committee. Those contracts are extremely lopsided in favor of the International Olympic Committee, and it gives them — and only them — the power to cancel the Olympics in a case like this. So, when the prime minister of Japan states in public, under pressure from people in Japan and around the world to cancel the Olympics — when the prime minister states in public that he actually doesn’t have the power to cancel the Olympics, he’s absolutely correct.

And that’s part of a larger state of exception that comes into the Olympic city when the Olympics arrive on your doorstep. There are all sorts of special laws that are put into place, all sorts of special rules that are put into place. New technologies are secured for the Olympics. So, for example, in Tokyo, you see facial recognition systems being put in place at all Olympic venues, even though they’re known for having a racial bias. Security forces use the Olympics to get all the special weapons and funding they’d normally never be able to get during normal political times.

And so, that’s exactly what we’re seeing transpire here. The all-powerful IOC, that is really a privileged sliver of the global 1%, is exerting itself and forcing the games ahead against the will of the population. More than 80% of the people in Japan oppose hosting the Olympics this summer, and yet the IOC insists on pressing ahead.

— Boykoff, scholar and former Olympic athlete who played for the U.S. Olympic soccer team from 1989 to 1991. He has published several pieces, his latest this morning in The Washington Post, “Tokyo is learning that the only force stronger than a pandemic is the Olympics.” His guest essay in The New York Times is headlined “A Sports Event Shouldn’t Be a Superspreader. Cancel the Olympics.” He’s written four books about the Olympics, his latest headlined NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond.

Donuts for that jab, and what about the booster, uh? Nah, do not expect free trips on a shit-hole cruise line. Expect a letter from Uncle Sam (Big Pharma induced) that states: “Thanks for participating in the Covid-19 vaccination last year, and we now have an easy-booster program. Kiosks, with your vaccine passport in hand on that app, you go to one of these, put that app on the scanner, along with your cornea scan, and put your left or right arm (doesn’t matter) into the high tech device, and there you go, instant booster. No line, nothing, since Big Tech will be hosting these kiosks by the millions in all those zip codes and all Census tracks. Isn’t Making America Vaccinated Great Again?”

I kid you not, so No Jab, No Life. Lockdown. Permanent. Expect those wearable ankle bracelets for all unvaccinated folk. Expect those by next Xmas.

That is the shifting baseline, no? Today, on Dissident Voice (May 27) hot off the digital press:

The ease with which the German authorities implemented the new official ideology, and how fanatically it has been embraced by the majority of Germans, came as something of a shock. I had naively believed that, in light of their history, the Germans would be among the first to recognize a nascent totalitarian movement predicated on textbook Goebbelsian Big Lies (i.e., manipulated Covid “case” and “death” statistics), and would resist it en masse, or at least take a moment to question the lies their leaders were hysterically barking at them.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Here we are, over a year later, and waiters and shop clerks are “checking papers” to enforce compliance with the new official ideology. (And, yes, the “New Normal” is an official ideology. When you strip away the illusion of an apocalyptic plague, there isn’t any other description for it). Perfectly healthy, medical-masked people are lining up in the streets to be experimentally “vaccinated.” Lockdown-bankrupted shops and restaurants have been converted into walk-in “PCR-test stations.” The government is debating mandatory “vaccination” of children in kindergarten. Goon squads are arresting octogenarians for picnicking on the sidewalk without permission. And so on. At this point, I’m just sitting here waiting for the news that mass “disinfection camps” are being set up to solve the “Unvaccinated Question.”

— “Greetings from “New Normal” Germany! by C.J. Hopkins

Oh, C.J. Hopkins, I wonder if you are getting the putridity of Capitalism, mixed with the strong arm and stiff arm salute of the Corporate elite, the Group of 30 and those 199 Companies controlling human and animal and flora kind! Make that an a great One-Seven, 17: Check out journalist Abby Martin interview Peter Phillips, former director of Project Censored and professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. His new book “Giants: The Global Power Elite” details the 17 transnational investment firms which control over $50 trillion in wealth—and how they are kept in power by their activists, facilitators and protectors.

So, donuts, ballpark trips, Super Bowl, marijuana, and alas, free cruise trips, to get the jab. Oh, wehat about all those millions who lined up for the jab who got nothing but a masked technician moving them along. Look at Portland, OR, man, of course, St. Clair laughing at any other narrative around SARS-CoV2. This Counterpuncher is, well, so so confident in his so-so wrong view of how to debate an issue. Shit!

When I arrived at the Convention Center (which Portland old-timers (ie, people who have lived here longer than five years) have long referred to as the Palais de Gaultier, because the twin glass cones outside the hulking post-modernist structure resemble the spiky bra Jean-Paul designed for Madonna during the Blonde Ambition Tour), it was clear that the vibe of the place had changed. Three weeks earlier, the cavernous building had a community atmosphere. The way stations were helmed by welcoming volunteers, the jabbing was done by retired physicians, the recovery rooms monitored by local nurses.

Now the building resembled an armed camp. Those of us about to be shot were herded into serpentine lines by burly figures in uniform and combat boots, their severe eyes scanning our faces from behind camouflaged masks. The festive spirit of April had been replaced by May’s military gloom.

The National Guard had taken over the operation and few of them looked glad to be here, as if helping to save what’s left of the Republic from a killer pandemic was beneath their calling and that they’d rather be searching the border for migrant “caravans” or making some of the last raids on peasant villages in Kandahar before the big show leaves Afghanistan.

There was something deeply unsettling about the entire scene and it flashed into my head that the Guard had taken over not for reasons of efficiency, but to instill popular fear about what a national health care system might look like if it fell into the wrong hands. The vaccination program in the US has been one of the most successful government operations in decades and one that the moneyed interests are desperate not to see replicated.

Oh, the most successful government operation in decades! Whew, C.J. Hopkins! His last posting on Counterpunch is August 2018! He starts publishing over at Off-Guardian, June 2018!

Here you go with those cruise lines, man!

Last week, the Economist asked the question in the title of its article about excessive corporate compensation – Will Shareholders Halt the Inexorable Rise of CEO Pay? Today, a clear majority of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings shareholders in what is called a “say-on-pay” vote, gave a big “thumbs down” to the company’s plan to pay its CEO Frank Del Rio $36,400,000 million for 2020, according to a Miami Herald article published this afternoon.

Herald Reporter Taylor Dolven wrote “in a rare rebuke, 83% of shareholders did not approve the company’s executive compensation in a non-binding vote” today. The newspaper cited Luis Navas, an executive compensation adviser, describing the vote as “incredibly embarrassing.”

Yes, its should be embarrassing, but that assumes this cruise executive is capable of feeling shame. Even before the pandemic, CEO Del Rio was the poster child of a spoiled, overpaid cruise executive in an industry where companies incorporate in places like Liberia (Royal Caribbean) and register their cruise ships in places like (Panama) and the Bahamas (NCL) in order to avoid all U.S. income taxes and wage and labor laws.

— Check it out, Dirty Cruises, Jim Walker’s cite

That new new abnormal normal here ends with the dumb PR rag from one of the alma maters, Eastern Washington University. It’s called, Eastern. It is a deplorable PR rag, like all the others I have been associated with through three college degrees — University of Arizona, University of Texas and now EWU.

There is an interim president, some political science faculty named David May. He replaced some English faculty who was president for a few months, who is going back to teaching in that English Department.

Some of the stuff coming from May’s mouth is pure “I am your leader and I listen to you and I was ready to save the world, err, Cheney, WA, and even Spokane, from the deadly pandemic.”

The “article” is just out, titled, “Man of the Moment.” On page 28 of the piece, it is clear this May has the agenda in mind of the World Economic Forum and Davos and the Tech Wunderkinds. He doesn’t know it, though.

The article’s write states that May isn’t dwelling on all the storms swirling around him. He is focused on the best way to serve students of Eastern, even before Covid-19. They call it, “right-sizing,” par of an Academic Review Program coming to a college and community college and university near you. Double-speak, this “right-sizing.”

As in sizing out programs. This is about student demand and regional needs for graduates, as well as looking at program to program, department to department, budget shortfalls.

“We will continue to teach art, we will continue to teach music, we will continue to teach philosophy, we will continue to teach political science, but we have to rethink how those things fit into the overall education of the student.”

Case closed, folks. This short of shit came into play for me as a graduate student in 1983, and while the great days of undergraduate school, 1974-1979, at the University of Arizona may have put me into the mix as a report and assistent editor of the daily Wildcat, this is the way of budgets determined by the capitalists, the Military Industrial Complex’s demands. And we know the MIC is:

• business programs
• chemistry programs
• biology programs
• marketing programs
• law programs
• computing programs
• engineering programs
• life sciences programs
• psychology departments
• sociology programs
• journalism programs
• bio-tech programs
• drone programs
• architecture programs
• criminal justice programs
• pharmacy programs
• communication programs
• planning programs
• health programshttps://www.truthdig.com/articles/rise-of-the-managerial-class/
• physics programs
• et al (look up a typical four-year research institution’s departments and programs and show me the ones NOT making bank from that MIC?)

That is the shifting baseline for some of us who thought, naively, that there would still be scrappy and independent minded and against Empire faculty and students participating in those schools of higher education. The entire system is corrupted, and alas, now, as I receive instanteous (a day after applying) rejections from various agencies, nonprofits and government agencies, I get that middle man’s life is the destroyer of it all. They sign up for my name, Paul Haeder, Paul K. Haeder, PK Haeder, to see the dirt on me. I have some cousin I never met, who is an MD with my name, so he must get some odd out of the blue emails or such, but in the end, the schools I have envisioned are nothing in comparison to K12 or K20 or post doctoral.

The political science faculty interim president of a small college (oh, they will put money into new buildings, new stadium infrastructure, etc. — you know, priorities) may have had a great teaching career, and he can just cite how he took over the helm under those swirling storms, but alas, this is what those liberal class and dream hoarders ( Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It)  and Professional Managerial Class (Source) have done.

At a time when corporate America is exploring and exploiting its new Supreme-Court-bestowed role in the management of American election results, an earlier transformation in the composition and political role of American business leadership should be recalled. This was the replacement of the Gilded Age capitalists and industrialists — audacious, rapacious and innovative, who created the post-Civil War American industrial economy — by the early 20th-century professional managers who took their place.

— William Pfaff

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional-managerial class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

— Chris Hedges

**Speech, W.E.B. DuBois

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all routinely lied to the American people about the success of the 18-year war in Afghanistan. They exaggerated progress and inflated statistics to create an illusion that that the war was winnable. But after the deaths of 157,000 people at a cost of $2 trillion, corruption is rampant and the carnage continues.

“There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue … mendacity and hubris,” John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during his January 15 testimony. In the last few years, Sopko said, the Trump administration has been “lying by omissions,” classifying “everything that is bad news,” including Afghan troop casualties and calculation of Taliban strength.

Sopko was called to testify before the committee to explain The Washington Post’s explosive December 2019 series known as “The Afghanistan Papers.” Based on hundreds of interviews with leading U.S. officials, Sopko published “Lessons Learned,” seven reports about the secret history of the war. The reports omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the interviewees.

“The American People Have Constantly Been Lied To”

“Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public,” the Post reported. “They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.” U.S. military officials took a page from the Vietnam War playbook, “manipulating public opinion.” As Sopko told the Post, “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

In September 2008, Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser declared in a news briefing, “Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way.”

Meanwhile, U.S. troops didn’t know whether the enemy was al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Pakistan, Islamic State, foreign jihadists or warlords on the CIA payroll.

Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a 2003 memo, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

Lost Blood and Treasure: For What?

Since Bush illegally invaded Afghanistan in 2001, about 157,000 people have been killed, including 2,300 U.S. military personnel and 43,074 Afghan civilians. In 2018 alone, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed, the highest yearly number since the United Nations began calculating casualties 10 years ago.

The cost of the United States’ longest war is over $2 trillion. That figure includes $1.5 trillion to wage war, $87 billion to train Afghan military and police, $10 billion for counter-narcotics, $24 billion for economic development, $30 billion for other reconstruction programs and $500 billion for interest.

Moreover, U.S. policies have exacerbated corruption in Afghanistan. “A toxic mix of U.S. government policies, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, directly contributed to Afghanistan’s descent into one of the world’s most corrupt countries,” the Post reported.

The massive amount of money Congress appropriated was distributed “with little oversight or recordkeeping,” according to the Post. “The ensuing greed and corruption undermined the legitimacy of the nascent government and helped make the ground more fertile for the Taliban’s resurgence.”

For example, a forensic accountant analyzed 3,000 Defense Department contracts from 2010 to 2012, totaling $106 billion. Approximately 40 percent of that money went to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan officials, criminal syndicates or insurgents.

A senior U.S. official reported, “[W]e were the most corrupt here, so had no credibility on the corruption issue.” One government contractor said he distributed $3 million per day for projects in an Afghan district the size of a county in the United States.

The Carnage Continues

On January 8, reportedly over 60 Afghan civilians and “dozens of militants” were killed in a U.S. drone attack in Herat Province. TOLO News, Afghanistan’s main 24/7 television news channel, cited local government officials and members of the Herat provincial council, who said “at least 60 civilians including women and children” were killed in the drone strikes.

Abdul Hakim told Stars & Stripes that U.S. bombers carried out a “double tap” in Herat, in which the drone or warplane bombs the people trying to rescue those hit by the first strike.

Two U.S. service members died on January 11, when their vehicle collided with an improvised explosive device. In 2019, 23 service members were killed during operations, the highest number in five years.

Withdraw All U.S. Forces From Afghanistan

The U.S. government has been negotiating with the Taliban. On January 16, the Taliban offered a brief period of reduction in the violence but it is not clear whether the U.S. has agreed. The two sides were on the brink of a peace agreement when Trump thwarted the negotiations in September 2019.

During the last Democratic debate, none of the candidates promised to pull all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan. Elizabeth Warren said she wants to bring combat troops home. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have also said they would withdraw combat troops. But, as Phyllis Bennis noted, “[C]ombat troops are not the ones who have been killing people probably since about 2011. The killing of civilians, in particular, is being carried out by Special Forces, by bombing, by drones.”

Both the progressive Veterans for Peace (VFP) and the conservative Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) support withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. CVA has mounted a multimillion-dollar advertising operation, funded by the Koch family, in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump’s unfulfilled 2016 campaign promise to end the United States’ “endless wars” was favorably received in those three swing states.

Veterans for Peace said in a statement, “The U.S. military has destroyed countless villages and continues to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred with covert drone operations that kill thousands of innocent people.” VFP called for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, immediate release of all 300 names of those quoted in the Afghanistan Papers, a congressional tribunal at which Afghanistan veterans could testify, repeal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and reparations to all Afghan families who have lost a family member.

A majority of U.S. veterans thinks the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not worth fighting, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. This mirrors the sentiment of the public at large.

After 18 years, it is long past time to end this war. We must contact our congressional representatives and Democratic presidential candidates, cite The Afghanistan Papers, and demand total withdrawal of all U.S. forces — including intelligence and Special Forces — from Afghanistan. It will save lives and money.