A blog about a criminal enterprise
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 14, 2019
The latest U.S. House of Representatives version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which is beyond global in scope and not the least bit defensive, offended Donald Trump’s desire for limitless power and spending in dozens of ways detailed by the people he employs to write things longer than tweets — and that was before it was amended. And the amendments are shockingly good.
If you’re going to pass a stinker of a bill, piling several
By a vote of 219 to 210, at 2:31 p.m. on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment introduced by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar requiring that the U.S. military provide Congress with the cost and the supposed national security benefits of every foreign military base or foreign military operation.
World BEYOND War had flooded Congressional offices with the demand for Yes votes.
Here is the text of the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act as passed:
At the end of
In the year 2000, the CIA gave Iran (slightly and obviously flawed) blueprints for a key component of a nuclear weapon. In 2006 James Risen wrote about this “operation” in his book State of War. In 2015, the United States prosecuted a former CIA agent, Jeffrey Sterling, for supposedly having leaked the story to Risen. In the course of the prosecution, the CIA made
By “the Obama wars” I don’t mean some overgrown infants on television screaming racist insults or pretending that opposing racism requires cheering for Obama.
I mean: the widespread indiscriminate murder of human beings with missiles — many of them from robot airplanes — let loose to threaten any non-white country on earth by Obama and expanded by Trump. I mean the catastrophic destruction of Libya — still continued by Trump. I mean the war on Afghanistan, the vast bulk of which was
Donald E. McInnis is the author of She’s So Cold: Murder, Accusations, and the System that Devastated a Family. He is a California criminal defense attorney, and he represented one of the three accused boys, Aaron Houser, in the Stephanie Crowe murder case. Over the span of his 40-year legal career, Mr. McInnis has worked alternately for the prosecution and for the defense, having served as a deputy district attorney for two California counties
The true story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun is public. The new movie dramatizing that story, with Keira Knightley in the starring role is called a thriller. And that it is.
How can a known event be made into a suspenseful thriller? In part this is possible because the story is a complex one that few know the details of, and in part because most people don’t know anything about anything. There’s too much information in the world, and most of it is useless or worse. The story
By David Swanson, Executive Director, World BEYOND War, July 3, 2019
Ending bigotry has gone mainstream among the enlightened people of the developed world.
Did you spot the acceptable bigotry in that sentence?
We’re against racism, sexism, and more kinds of bigotry than I could ever list.
But the 96 percent of humanity that’s not within the United States is hardly worthy of concern.
Millions of lives in Yemen lack the value of one Washington Post reporter dismembered with a bone saw.
Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national organization based in Washington, D.C. that promotes criminal justice reform. His books include The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, coauthored with Ashley Nellis. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has just released a report that draws on testimony by Marc Mauer on the impact of felony disenfranchisement.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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