War Is A Crime

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

It’s hard to imagine how I would have done my work at TomDispatch over the last decade without one crucial resource: Brown University’s Costs of War Project. read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 10, 2021

“Blimey, Harry!” exclaimed Ronald Weasley, his face pressed to the window, peering out at the swiftly passing countryside as the glistening red Hogwarts Express belched coal smoke into the sky on its way north to Glasgow for the COP26 climate conference. “If the secret that you have to find is both known and unknown to all Muggles, then it follows that it’s known to a lot of us too. And it also follows” — Ron turned to face his friend read more

“The Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan was correct and long overdue. However, the way America’s longest war ended is a different question. It was a botched affair. The generals will most likely never be held to account. But a lone Marine lieutenant colonel does face a court martial. Is this justice? CrossTalking with Medea Benjamin, David Swanson, and Sara Flounders.”

The Nobel Committee has yet again awarded a peace prize that violates the will of Alfred Nobel and the purpose for which the prize was created, selecting recipients who blatantly are not “the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.”

That there are numerous candidates who plausibly meet the criteria and could have been appropriately awarded a Nobel Peace Prize read more

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

Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad our Afghan allies — in other words, the very government and military we had created there — were. read more

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

This week on Talk World Radio: a new book called Punishment Without Trial: Why Pleabargaining Is a Bad Deal. The author, Carissa Byrne Hessick, is the Ransdell Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she also serves as the director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project. Before joining the faculty at UNC, she taught read more

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

Recently, I stumbled across an old book project of mine, long forgotten. It was something I had been writing in perhaps 1998 and 1999 but never finished. In reading through it, I was surprised to discover a reference to climate change (“…even the unlikely removal of every nuclear weapon from this earth wouldn’t come close to purging the planet of exterminatory consciousness read more

Photo of Kunduz Hospital in Afghanistan via The Intercept.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 2, 2021

A recent article and a recent book have raised this familiar topic anew for me. The article is a super uninformed dud of a hatchet job on Michael Ratner by Samuel Moyn, who accuses Ratner of supporting war by trying to reform and humanize rather than end it. The critique is terribly weak because Ratner tried to prevent wars, end wars, AND reform wars. Ratner was at every antiwar event. read more

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

Forget old hot wars or even new cold ones — the weather’s clearly changing. In fact, according to a new study, read more