Speaking Truth to Empire on KFCF 88.1 FM independently owned and locally operated since 1975 in Fresno, Dan Yaseen interviews Cindy Sheehan, one of America’s leading antiwar and anti-Empire activist. They discussed Trump administration’s threats of war against Iran and Venezuela; they also talked about the sordid history of American Empire. Her website is: www.cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com
What’s to celebrate?: US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home
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.”
An Honorable Course in Iran: End Sanctions, Resume Dialogue – Kathy Kelly
June 25, 2019 Last week, Elham Pourtaher, an Iranian graduate student at the State University of New York in Albany, wrote about how U.S. policies cause suffering and trauma far beyond U.S. borders. Her diabetic father, for example, is in danger of losing access to medicines because sanctions against Iranian
Trump says accept you’re a loser and we can be friends: ‘Genius’ President Plays with Fire
By John Grant
President Donald Trump go soft at the last minute and decide the 150 Iranian souls expected to die in an attack that was “10 minutes away” should live? We’re told the planes were in the air when he had his magnanimous, humanitarian moment. It reminds me of the story told by Fyodor Dostoevsky about being in front of a firing squad as a young man, ready to die — when at the very last moment, a messenger arrives: “The Czar has
Speaking Truth to Empire
On “Speaking Truth to Empire” on KFCF 88.1 FM independently owned and locally operated in Fresno since 1975, Dan Yaseen interviews Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, author, columnist and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She lectures throughout the world on international human rights and U.S. foreign policy. Topics of discussion include Trump administration’s belligerence against Iran and moving the world toward Doomsday. Her website is, www.marjoriecohn.com
The US as rogue nation number 1: What About International Law and Invasions Requiring UN Security Council Approval?
By Dave Lindorff
President Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are saying that they have proof that Iran blew holes in two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz linking the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, and so, we’re being told in a report in the Jerusalem Post and earlier in Newsweek magazine, they are considering, along with Pentagon brass, having the US launch an intense missile attack on Iran’s main uranium refining plant.
There’s
What about Venezuela’s hacked power grid?: US Cyber Attack on Russia’s Power Grid is an ‘Act of War’ (According to the US)
By Dave Lindorff
Russia and the US are engaging in tit-for-tat hacking of each others’ power grid, the New York Times is reporting, in what is really a kind of cyber “cold war” where the hackers from each country’s military and intelligence services load electronic “explosives” in the computer systems of criticalinfrastructure of the other, that in a crisis or war could be “detonated” to create chaos or bring down electric grids.
Captain ‘cops’ cop: Blood-Red Whitewash on a Blue Sea
By Linn Washington, Jr.
Remember the Vincennes?
That’s the name of the U.S. Navy warship that shot down an Iranian airliner with missiles in 1988, killing all 290 people aboard that airplane.
That shootdown, where 60 children perished, was an accident, according to the U.S. Navy’s official report. However, many, including military personnel, considered that report a whitewash.
That U.S. military attack on a civilian airliner occurred during a time when the administration of then U.S. President Ronald Reagan was all but openly supporting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had launched a war of aggression against Iran – the nation now in the crosshairs of the President Donald Trump Administration.
The Vincennes incident is instructive a the Trump Administration is seemingly searching for a ripe moment to launch a war against Iran, an action long sought by right-wing forces in the United States along with U.S. Middle East allies Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Similar to U.S. anti-Iran stances in the 1980s when the U.S. pressured Iran as part of its tilt toward the invading but quickly battered Iraqis, the Trump Administration is waging an economic war against Iran through economy-crippling sanctions. The goal is to bludgeon Iran after Trump unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear non-proliferation treaty that had Iran’s full compliance.
The July 3, 1988 Vincennes incident is also instructive because it vividly displayed of how things can go horribly wrong really quick and how the U.S. government will brazenly lie to evade liability for its criminal misconduct.
With the U.S. playing a ‘Top Cop’ role in the Persian Gulf – today as in the 1980s ostensibly to contain Iran – it’s interesting that the U.S. Navy’s defense of that indefensible 1988 airliner shootdown contained components of excuses utter persistently by American police in instances of fatal shootings of unarmed civilians.
In the cases of those murdered by American cops, the offending officer immediately declares he or she fired because they feared for their life. The captain of the Vincennes declared he ordered the airliner to be shot down because he feared for his life…the life of his ship and crew allegedly endangered by an unarmed civilian airliner.
Like the standard cop defense of supposedly seeing a gun in the hand of the unarmed suspect, Vincennes Captain Will Rogers claimed he saw a jet fighter descending in fast attack approach not a widebody airliner ascending after taking off from an airport…
For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINGTON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, seven-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/blood-red-white-wash-on-blue-sea/
New TCBH! poem: The most dangerous country
Speaking Truth to Empire
“Speaking Truth to Empire” on KFCF 88.1 FM independently owned and locally operated in Fresno since 1975, Dan Yaseen interviews Regis Tremblay, an independent filmmaker and a blogger, interested in activism and the environment. He lives in Woolwich, Maine. Topic of discussion will be deteriorating US – Russia relations that is moving us toward nuclear annihilation. His website is: www.registremblay.com