War Is A Crime

If the purpose of the current Trump impeachment hearings were simply to fulfill Congress Members’ oaths of office and do their jobs, it would be difficult to explain the past many years. Jerrold Nadler, Chair of the Judiciary Committee for the past 11 months, has known since inauguration day that Trump was in egregious violation of the emoluments clauses, and has since declared other Trump actions impeachable without moving to impeach him. Impeachable offenses by Trump, Obama, Bush, and on back read more

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In case you hadn’t noticed (and not to notice you’d have to be blind), we’re not exactly alone in this country anymore. We were true pioneers in what might be considered a great American tradition of interfering in the affairs of other nations — think read more

Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council (NIC), before retiring in 2010 after a 27-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency. She was a political analyst focusing on various Middle Eastern countries and also served as an editor and media analyst for the U.S. Government’s Open Source Center, OSC, now known as the Open Source Enterprise. She is conversant in German, Arabic, and Spanish. A member of Veteran Intelligence read more

It’s impossible in U.S. society not to frequently encounter the demand to vote, no matter what, no matter for whom, as a basic civic duty. Voting is supremely important, we’re told, a right, a responsibility, a moral requirement, something people died for which if you don’t use (even if it’s useless) you will effectively be pissing on their graves. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said “If everyone would vote, it wouldn’t matter what the billionaires wanted.”

Let’s accept read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

I saw the piece in the Guardian in July 2018 and must admit I was stunned by it. It wasn’t that, on the issue of climate change, I hadn’t already read plenty of bad news about what was to come for humanity. Somehow, though, this story read more

A reflection on the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7

By Brian Terrell

“Whether nuclear weapons are actually illegal under international or domestic law (a doubtful proposition) is not relevant or an appropriate issue to litigate in this case,” so ruled Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, late on Friday October 18. This last minute order, restricting the defense of seven antinuclear activists at a trial that began Monday morning the 21^st, read more

November 11, 2019, is Armistice Day 101 (or 102 if you want to be all mathematically accurate and elitist about it). Anyway, it’s been over a century now since World War I was ended at a scheduled moment (11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918).

For decades in the United States, as elsewhere, Armistice Day (in some countries it’s called Remembrance Day) was a holiday of peace, of sad remembrance and the joyful ending of war, and of a commitment to preventing war in the future. read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

What a strange world we’re in! Imagine that only recently Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the remaining 1,000 U.S. military personnel from Syria (launching a bloodbath in Kurdish-controlled areas on its northern border in the process). He was, if you remember, bringing read more

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the President of Mexico, was not eager to accept Donald Trump’s offer to fight a war against drug dealers. In fact, AMLO replied as follows (in so far as I’m able to translate; see the video below to verify, and please send me your translations):

The worst that could be, the worst thing we could see, would be war.

Those who have read about war, or those who have suffered from a war, know what war means.

War is the opposite of politics. read more