Testimony for the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service

Submitted by David Swanson, April 16, 2019

I was more surprised that your commission contacted me with a kind-of, sort-of invitation to speak than that you ultimately decided not to include me. I thank you for inviting me to submit testimony.

You had read my article, “Draft Registration Will Be Either Ended or Imposed on Women.” I’ve included it below.

I understand that you had already booked these four speakers and then managed to add a fifth: Edward Hasbrouck, Diane Randall, Jude Eden, Mark read more

Exporting Dictators

The U.S. government gets little credit for it, doesn’t even like to brag about it, but as of 2017 provided military “aid” to 73% of the world’s dictatorships. Ocassionally, the U.S. turns against one of its dictators and chooses that moment to tell everyone about him: Hussein, Noriega, Gadaffi, Assad. Sometimes it loses a dictator for other reasons: the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak.

Sometimes the U.S. imposes a U.S. dictator on a foreign colony: as historically in the Philippines, or Haiti, read more

10 Reasons Assange Should Walk Free

By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War

  1. Governments’ (monstrous and criminal) behavior should not be secret. People should know what their government is doing, and what a powerful foreign government is doing to their own countries. The actual results of the work of WikiLeaks have been hugely beneficial.
  2. If U.S. courts were to get busy prosecuting the crimes exposed by WikiLeaks, rather than trying to turn the act of revealing them into some sort of crime, they would simply
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Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen Moment

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

Here was a tweet from October 2014 about a president who liked to golf: “Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf. Worse than Carter.” And that was just one of 27 times between 2011 and 2016 read more

Tomgram: Alfred W. McCoy, America’s Self-Inflicted Wound

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

He was a graduate student when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he started to explore the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He soon found himself, almost inadvertently, on the heroin trail across Southeast Asia and deep into the CIA’s involvement in an earlier version of America’s drug wars. In a shadow world of black ops, mercenaries, read more

New TCBH! poem: ‘Patriarchy — how it ends’

The kings,
They come in caravans to die
And they bring with them their servants.
And their jewels stay with them
When they are buried

One hundred years apart
In the back yard.
And their graves
Fall down
And are removed

For paving stones
And the road that the kings arrived on
Is called Kings Highway.
Now cars race along that way
Right off the edge

And are buried and so on.
And doesn’t this sound familiar?
The lights turn green;
They let the cars go,
And then they turn red as blood

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Talk Nation Radio: Maria Zakharova on Ukraine and NATO

Maria Zakharova is an activist and public lecturer based in Odessa, Ukraine. She has been a strong supporter of the Council of Mothers of May 2, which represents relatives of the scores of progressives murdered at Odessa’s House of Trade Unions by a right-wing mob on May 2, 2014, just a few months after the coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Ever since the massacre, Zakharova has been promoting the demand by the Council of Mothers for an international investigation read more