A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
Now that the flags are back waving from the tops of flagpoles across the country, and the maudlin paeans to the close to 3000 lives lost in the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it’s time we gave a thought to the dead who were ignored.
According to very conservative estimates, as reported by the “Costs of War” project of Brown University’s Watson Institute on International and Public Affairs, nearly 250,000 civilians have been
By Dave Lindorff
Yes, Iran is increasing the number of centrifuges it is using to refine nuclear fuel, and yes, it is refining that fuel to a higher percentage of U-235, the isotope that allows the uranium to begin a chain reaction necessary for both fueling a nuclear reactor and for creating an atomic bomb.
But in taking these steps, Iran is not, and indeed cannot be “in violation” of the agreement on its nuclear program that
By Dave Lindorff
My wife, Joyce, and I recently traveled to Vienna for a week, where she had been invited to perform on Austrian state radio. Passing through Heathrow on our way home, we were separated by an automated security gate. The gate, which required you to scan your boarding pass, allowed Joyce through, but when I ran my pass, it flashed “Invalid.”
A security attendant pointed me to a transit desk where
By Dave Lindorff
Almost three-quarters of a century ago on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a 22-kiloton plutonium bomb called the “Fat Man” on Nagasaki.The total destruction of that city, and the instant incineration of 40,000 mostly civilian people, occurred just three days after the destruction of Hiroshima by a 15-kiloton uranium bomb, which instantly killed 70,000. This criminal one-two punch by the US launched the atomic age.
The bombings have always been, and still are, presented to young Americans in school history texts, and to Americans in general by government propaganda, as having been “necessary” to end
By Dave Lindorff
Cambridge, UK, Aug. 6 — Seventy-four years ago today, the US dropped the first ever atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, a non-military target of several hundred thousand, instantly vaporizing some 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and causing the painful, slower death of another 70,000 who died of burns and radioactive damage to their bodies over the next four months. Another 60,000 died later over the years of cancers caused by the bomb’s radioactive pulse and
By Dave Lindorff
Liberals are upset that the new Supreme Court, packed with conservatives, has decided President Trump can have $2.6 billion of the Pentagon’s new FY 2020 $738 billion budget to build some wall along the Mexican border.
But I think they’re thinking all wrong about this. Instead of complaining and fighting a losing battle against Trump’s nutty idea of walling off the southern border (most immigrants come into the US by plane, or
You mass media folks lead busy lives, I’m sure. But you must have heard something about nuclear weapons―those supremely destructive devices that, along with climate change, threaten the continued existence of the human race.
Yes, thanks to popular protest and carefully-crafted arms control and disarmament agreements, there has been some progress in limiting the number of these weapons and averting a nuclear holocaust. Even so, that progress has been rapidly unraveling in recent months,
by Kathy Kelly
July 23, 2019
“I felt shaky and uneasy all day, preparing for this talk” – Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian from the territory of Gaza
Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian now living in the United States, grew up in Gaza. In Chicago last week, addressing activists committed to breaking the siege of Gaza, he held up a stack of 31 papers. On each page were names of 1,254 Palestinians living in Gaza who had been killed in just one month of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge”
By Dave Lindorff
As I set out to fly home from the UK on Monday following a short film project in Cambridge, I found my boarding pass, which I had been blocked from obtaining online the night before, carrying a bold-faced stamp in the lower right corner. Asking about it I was told by the British employee at the United check-in counter, “That is because you are on a US Department of Homeland Security list, sir.”