War Is A Crime

Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator who opposed the war on Vietnam and entered the Penatgon Papers into the Congressional Record. He has been an activist and advocate for democracy and peace for decades. He is a current candidate for U.S. President in the Democratic Party primaries. See mikegravel.org

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Joshua Douglas’ new book, Vote for Us: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, does not explain when it was that we had our elections or what we can vote for other than “us,” but it does provide a great survey of election reform efforts, who’s working on them, and what’s working, with a list of organizations at the back that you can engage with.

While voter ID laws have spread, the racist stripping of names from polls goes unmentioned, threats and intimidation read more

I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.

“You’re welcome for the service!”

Fallujah was the “city of mosques,” made up read more

Go right now and get yourself and the nearest house with a flag in front of it a copy of Roberto Sirvent’s and Danny Haiphong’s American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

If this book had existed when I published Curing Exceptionalism, I would have said that reading it was part of the cure. The authors provide a rich survey and analysis of how people in the United States manage to believe themselves read more

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

It started with “Fort Trump.” Last September, while visiting the White House, Polish president Andrzej Duda only half-jokingly suggested that very name for the new U.S. base he was proposing the Pentagon set up in his country (and was offering more than $2 billion to support). In other words, read more

Entertainment misinforms. Humans cannot possibly survive into a distant future that includes light-speed travel while simultaneously behaving like feral animals. Torture doesn’t work. Politicians don’t resemble Martin Sheen. The poor little United States is not threatened by irrational evil empires. Violence won’t save us from masked storm troopers, evil wizards, or whomever Boeing and Lockheed Martin armed last year.

But at least we used to pretend there was a dividing line, back before read more

In a day and age when many of us are taught to overcome prejudice and behave respectfully toward all, mainstream U.S. media and school texts still habitually portray U.S. lives as the only lives that really matter. A plane crash that kills dozens of human beings is reported, just like a war, with the bulk of the coverage on the handful of U.S. lives lost. A U.S. military read more

The City of Charlottesville will be considering the question of divestment from weapons and fossil fuels at its meeting on May 6th.

For details on the divestment campaign, how to attend the meeting, and what else you can do to help in Charlottesville or in any other town, see http://divestcville.org

U.S. weapons companies arm three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships and both sides of numerous wars. Without the U.S. government’s support for fighters in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, there read more

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

Consider it a conundrum. Both parties in Congress and the president simply can’t pour enough money into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state. As a result, theirs has been a cumulative trillion-dollar read more