In the Great Law. Supposedly. The thing is, I can't find the text online. How GREAT can that law really be? Can anybody find it?

That was the argument made in a U.S. bestseller in 2009 written by a WWII historian whose father had raised the US flag on Iwo Jima. And the Roosevelt he had in mind was Teddy, not Franklin.

Needless to say, although countless people will say it quite angrily in my Email inbox in response to this article, you cannot simply blame an event on actions that occurred years before. A war is started by the people who start that war, in that instant, and there is no way for them to wiggle out of that responsibility. But, as everyone is eager to recognize when the context is more comfortable, all actions have consequences, and those consequences have further consequences. (As a warning that may further temper the vitriol, I would like to point out that Teddy was not a Democrat.)

2.21.11 Best-selling author David Swanson joins Coy to discuss the labor unrest in Wisconsin. Be sure to check out his most recent book War is a Lie.

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Michael Nagler tells this story:

UPDATE: Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the World War II Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and founding father of the International Criminal Court, will make an important statement on U.S. foreign policy at an event with David Swanson and Sandy Davies in Boca Raton on Feb. 26, 2011.

David Swanson and Nicolas "Sandy" Davies in South Florida on Feb. 26, 2011

Click for flyer (PDF):

David Swanson will discuss and sign copies of "War Is A Lie".
Sandy Davies will discuss and sign copies of "Blood on Our Hands".

3-5 p.m. Saturday, February 26, 2011
Saint Andrews Estates South Auditorium
6045 Verde Trail South
Boca Raton, FL 33433

PLEASE RSVP to nparker0511 at gmail dot com
561-702-4174

Sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America

"While most media continue to ignore the US-installed disaster in Iraq, author Nicolas Davies refuses to do so, and his book 'Blood on our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq' could not be released at a better time. This sweeping work covers US policy in Iraq that spans decades, and is written as a call to action for the US to begin following international law—not just in Iraq, but everywhere. For it was the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq that, more than perhaps anything else, continues to defile what is left of the tattered reputation of the US." -Dahr Jamail

"David Swanson’s War Is A Lie may be the most comprehensive antiwar statement available in the English language." — Kevin Young

"Not since General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket has a simpler, more brilliant, or truer book been published." — Geoffrey Millard

“David Swanson despises war and lying, and unmasks them both with rare intelligence. I learn something new on every page.” — Jeff Cohen

When a satirist published a phony U.S. government report in 1967 that recommended against allowing peace to ever break out, most people seemed to fall for the prank. Members of the news media were either in on the joke or victims. The copy I have is marked up with a yellow highlighter by someone who grew angrier and angrier through the book's pages. Toward the end, when the authors of the "report" advocated reviving slavery, the previous owner of my copy scrawled "BULL SHIT" in all caps across two pages.

This will be a familiar experience to anyone who has ever used both Twitter and sarcasm. No matter how outrageous the joke, there are those who will take it seriously and who will insist on taking it seriously even after having been let in on the joke. Thus the "Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace" still has believers in its authenticity despite being an obvious prank.

Speaking of Sex: An interview with Christopher Ryan
by Barry F. Seidman and Arnell Dowret
The psychologist and co-author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality looks at what the evidence says about humans’ “natural” state.

SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT: War is A Lie
by David Swanson
“There has probably never been a war that hasn’t been explained as an absolutely necessary, inevitable, and unavoidable last resort.”

Making Friends in High Places
by Kathy Kelly, Jerica Arents, and David Smith-Ferri
Three American peace activists meet their young Afghani counterparts.

From THE HUMANIST

If Bradley Manning turns out to be the hero he appears to be, he will not be the first "detained" at Quantico.

In fact, Quantico once locked up the most decorated Marine in history, a Marine who would have been running the Marine Corps rather than getting locked up by it if he had known how to brown-nose the swivel-chair commanders as he called them, a Marine who had helped create Quantico years before, the first senior officer in the U.S. military to be arrested in the 65 years following the Civil War, and a serious fearless principled democratic hero whose heroism had nothing to do with the nasty tasks he took on as a U.S. Marine.

And do you know what they locked him up for? For revealing that Benito Mussolini had run a little girl over in his car and not even stopped.

David Swanson on military budget, Aram Roston on Bloomberg

CounterSpin (2/18/11-2/24/11)
 

The U.S. Economy:

Arizona Immigration:

Egypt:

Healthcare:

New York:

Bread and Puppets Circus
Random Row Bookstore
Charlottesville VA
Feb 17, 2011
Video by David Swanson

In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world's media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.

Colin Powell doesn't have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It's on videotape.

From KGNU with Liz Lane:

LISTEN.

As we approach the 8th anniversary of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, and having just passed the 20th anniversary of another, it's worth reflecting on what's been accomplished through two wars and the intervening sanctions that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright so famously approved of even at the cost of a half million children's lives.

Whether or not one recklessly and misleadingly includes Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid in discussions of the federal discretionary budget, the fact remains that over half of the discretionary budget (of everything other than Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid) is military. The primary talking point coming out of the White House is the need to freeze all non-military discretionary spending. And yet it is difficult to find a progressive analysis of the budget President Obama proposed on Monday that even mentions the existence of the military.

2.14.11 Best-selling non-fiction author David Swanson joins Coy with an update on the revolution in Egypt. Swanson describes just how inspiring the revolution is to civil rights activists around the world. He notes the impact of non-violent training by the citizen activists in the streets of Egypt, and says that method of protest is more effective than military involvement. Along those lines, Swanson comments on the importance of the writings of noted non-violence author Gene Sharp being translated into Arabic. Finally, David gives his analysis of how the events in Egypt will influence American political action. Be sure to check out Swanson’s latest book War Is A Lie.

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In this age of supposedly fighting against rulers and on behalf of oppressed peoples, the Vietnam War offers an interesting case in which the U.S. policy was to avoid overthrowing the enemy government but to work hard to kill its people. To overthrow the government in Hanoi, it was feared, would draw China or Russia into the war, something the United States hoped to avoid. But destroying the nation ruled by Hanoi was expected to cause it to submit to U.S. rule.

David Swanson Podcast

From Marc Steiner

David Swanson is a writer and progressive political activist.  His latest book is War is a Lie.

We recently interviewed David Swanson at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.  Here is our interview, along with the lively audience Q & A.

By David Swanson

Obama is seeking to cut off poor people's heat in the winter and AC in the summer, in a move that Bush attempted and saw blocked by ACORN.

This brings a whole new meaning to Obama's "ACORN who? Never met them in my life!" routine when Fox News destroyed the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now with a big assist from Congress.

Let's take a little trip back in time, shall we? All the way baaaaaaaaack to 2003:

While 50 ACORN members were in the Illinois Republican Party headquarters, the phone rang, and an ACORN member answered it "ACORN, Can I help you?"

On the other end, they said, "What, ACORN? Wait a minute, this is the Republican Party in D.C. calling the Republican Party in Illinois."

By David Swanson

Muslims can look back to the classic nonviolent struggle against British empire waged by the Pashtuns from 1930-1934 in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. The leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement makes every list of campaigns chronicling the development of modern nonviolent activism.

Nonviolence is also the dominant tool of resistance in the Middle East -- resistance to local corruption and to foreign occupation alike. Nonviolence doesn't make it into corporate news reporting very much, and there are two main explanations for that. One, terrorism sells newspapers. Two, democracy threatens corporate power.

By David Swanson

To kneel before the corporate throne of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And here's what he had to say there on Monday.

President Obama again stressed that he wanted to freeze non-war/military spending well into the next president's tenure:

"That's why I've proposed that we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. Understand what this means. This would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and bring this spending -- domestic discretionary spending -- down to the lowest share of our economy since Eisenhower was president. That was a long time ago."

President Obama again pretended that Social Security is breaking a budget that it is not in any way a part of, and that Social Security is in trouble. (In reality the damage he did to it a few months back could be repaired and more by simply requiring people with large incomes to pay in at the same rate as people with small ones):

By David Swanson

What makes the most fantastic and undocumented war-launching and war-prolonging lies credible are differences and prejudices, against others and in favor of our own. Without religious bigotry, racism, and patriotic jingoism, wars would be harder to sell.

Religion has long been a justification for wars, which were fought for gods before they were fought for pharaohs, kings, and emperors. If Barbara Ehrenreich has it right in her book "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War," the earliest precursors to wars were battles against lions, leopards, and other ferocious predators of people. In fact, those predatory beasts may be the base material from which gods were invented — and unmanned drones named (e.g. "the Predator").

By David Swanson

The danger of permitting the Egyptians democracy, rather than replacing a dictator with his (and our) torturer lies, let us be honest, not in the possibility that Egyptian politics will approach the religiosity of our own Republican Party, and not in the possibility that the civil liberties we have helped deny Egyptians for decades won't all be immediately established, and certainly not in the possibility that the Egyptians would commit collective suicide by attempting to attack the United States, but rather in the possibility that other peoples would be inspired to attempt self-rule as well, and -- more directly -- in the probability that Egypt would cease to uphold the collective punishment of the people of Gaza.

The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush
From Feral House

Congressman Dennis Kucinich With Additional Material by David Swanson and Elizabeth de la Vega

trade paperback edition • 156 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 • ISBN: 978-1-932595-42-0 • $12

Feral House offers this important and urgent publication of Dennis Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment in two formats: an offset-printed paperback book available for the cost of $12 and a free downloadable PDF available below.

David Swanson’s additional article explains how the Impeachment process is possible and necessary even after the guilty perp leaves office, and how they can be used for prosecution of crimes. Those wishing to purchase over ten copies of the printed book can obtain them at discount from Feral House directly. Please contact info@feralhouse.com for costs.

"More than two centuries ago, the Founders of this country set forth a procedure for Congress to follow in the event of grave abuse of power by the Chief Executive. That process is impeachment. In the face of the monumental deceit and disregard for the Constitution that we have witnessed on the part of the President over the past seven years, Congressman Kucinich’s initiation of this process is neither fanciful nor futile, neither vengeful nor vindictive; it is the sober fulfillment of his sworn duty as a Congressman to follow the law without regard to personal consequence and misguided political stratagem. It is, quite simply, an act of patriotism."
—Elizabeth de la Vega, Former Federal Prosecutor and author of United States v. George W. Bush et. al.

"This collection of impeachable offenses should be viewed as a sampling of the crimes and abuses of President George W. Bush and his subordinates. Bush has had many accomplices — first and foremost Vice President Cheney. But our Founders created a single executive precisely so that we could hold that one person accountable for the actions of the executive branch. It is high time we did so, and millions of Americans will be urging their representatives to support the effort being led by Congressman Kucinich.  These articles establish, and hearings would establish further, that President Bush was ‘the decider’ behind countless abuses of power. And, of course, his public comments have time and again advertised his indifference to the laws he is violating. Not only does overwhelming evidence show us that Bush knew his claims about WMDs to be false, but the president has shown us that he considers the question of truth or falsehood to be laughably irrelevant. When Diane Sawyer asked Bush why he had claimed with such certainty that there were so many weapons in Iraq, he replied: 'What’s the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger.' What’s the difference? Hundreds of thousands of corpses and a fatal blow to the rule of law among nations. That’s the difference. Unless we remove impeachment from the Constitution by failing to exercise it, in which case truth will no longer matter any more than justice or peace."
— David Swanson, creator of ImpeachCheney.org, Washington Director  of Democrats.com and co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org.

"Overload is the main problem—I call it outrage fatigue. The sheer multitude, not to mention magnitude, of impeachable offenses tends to dull the senses. The opportunity to dig into just one or two provided some space and focused the mind. At the same time, the deeper one digs, the more unimaginable the dirt that comes up. Earlier, I had not taken the time to sift through the abundant evidence of the unconscionable ways in which George Bush and George Tenet teamed up—including, in Tenet’s case, lying under oath—to stave off charges of misfeasance/ malfeasance before the attacks on 9/11. The Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to create a system in which we could protect ourselves from unbridled power. Today, we cannot let a 21st Century string of abuses and usurpations stand without challenge. But the experience of the past several years shows that there is a very high hurdle in our way: no Common Sense. I refer, of course, to the courageous independent journalism of the likes of Tom Paine who stirred the innate dignity of Americans toward sacrifice for independence and freedom. Tom Paine would be horrified to see what has become of his profession today—with browbeaten journalists and former general officers doing the bidding of the corporations that own/pay them.In my view, impeachment proceedings are essential to:

• Reestablish the separation of powers in our Constitution as a check on the so-called unitary executive
• Prevent a budding—and catastrophic—US attack on Iran by exposing it as yet another war of aggression against a country posing no threat to the US;
• Call attention to the blood already drained from our civil liberties and staunch the bleeding.

"Impeachment proceedings may be the only way to force the captive media to inform normal citizens about what has been going on in our country. Thomas Jefferson underscored the importance of this when he said: 'Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.'”
—Ray McGovern; former Army officer and CIA analyst; co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

"President Bush, Cheney and other US officials have violated numerous domestic and international laws governing crime of aggression, war crime, torture, etc., and they should be not only impeached by the US Congress but also be prosecuted by a special prosecutor, to the full extent of the law before or after impeachment. That is the best way to uphold the US Constitution and the rule of law at home and abroad."
—John Kim, Esq., Attorney; author of The Crime of Aggression Against Iraq

"The breadth of impeachable offenses committed by the Bush/Cheney administration is likely unparalleled in our nation’s history. Equally unparalleled, and in many cases even more alarming and outrageous, is the lack of accountability brought to the perpetrators of these High Crimes and Misdemeanors. It is the Constitutional duty of members of Congress—members from any political party—to bring such accountability, particularly when the list of crimes began with the very acts that brought this administration into office during their elections, and right up through today when the same sort of crimes continue, and are in place to try and affect our next Presidential Election. This is not about politics, it’s about the Constitutional duty of Congress. If a line in the sand is not drawn immediately and clearly in the face of such corruption and disdain for our American values, such as the Rule of Law, the historical bar for criminality in our Executive Branch will have been forever lowered, no matter who happens to serve in the White House in the future."
—Brad Friedman, creator/ editor of The Brad Blog, and co-founder  of the watchdog organization VelvetRevolution.us.

“I have provided the legal architecture and evidence for a trial to prosecute the President for murder. My book lends credence to a powerful case for impeachment laid out persuasively by Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s 35 Articles of Impeachment.”
— Vincent Bugliosi, Former District Attorney, author of  The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

Download the entire book free!

By David Swanson

Donald Rumsfeld began his new book tour with some frank comments, including these:

"War lies? Does anybody really give a rat's ass now? You know what? You know what? They do. They do because war lies are actually cool now. We began the invasion of Iraq in October 2001, but the invasion of Iraq paid off."

Rumsfeld revealed the strategy behind the revelations made in his book about the illegal secret operations he helped set in motion shortly after the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001:

"Former President Bush has not admitted to torture or fraud or aggression or the rest of it, and do you know why? You do know why, but it is an unknown known, if you know what I mean. Yes, it is funny. He hasn't admitted to any such things because he has chosen to claim them proudly instead.

By David Swanson

Did you know that the U.S. public wants military spending cut? Did you know that President Barack Obama wants to increase it for his third year in a row? Actually I already know that most of you didn't know either of these things.

A poll released on Tuesday and in line with other polling over the years asked: "To ensure its safety, should the United States always spend at least three times as much on defense as any other nation?" This question mislabels the military "defense," which most of it isn't, and claims the interest of "safety," albeit in the context of other questions about spending money, and yet only 25% of voters said yes, while 40% said no and 35% were not sure.