Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, The 100-Year-Old Echoes of 2019
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Typical of last week’s news when it came to immigration and the U.S. border was a Soviet-style “purge” of the Department of Homeland Security, or to cite another grimly appropriate word, as an unnamed official of the Department of Homeland Security did
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A “Ridiculous” War
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American War Is Off the Charts
How the U.S. Military Feeds at the Terror Trough
By Tom Engelhardt
Here’s a statement it might be hard to disagree with: American war is off the charts.
Still, I’d like to explain — but I’m nervous about doing so. I know perfectly well that the next word I plan to write will send most of you tumbling elsewhere in a universe in which “news”
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
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,
10 Reasons Assange Should Walk Free
By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War
- 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.
- 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
Free Julian Assange! Stand up for press freedom!: London Police Grab Wikileaks Founder from Ecuador Embassy, Admit US Seeks His Extradition
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By Dave Lindorff The arrest by British Metropolitan Police of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, dragged The arrest by British Metropolitan Police of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, dragged unceremonially out of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on a charge of failure to appear for a court hearing on an expired (and trumped-up) accusation in Sweden of sexual assault, is a grave and terrible threat to independent journalism and to the US Constitution’s First Amendment promise of freedom of the press. Make no mistake. This arrest, made at the UK government’s insistence, for “failure to appear” in court for a no longer required hearing on an expired Swedish extradition request to “question him” about a bogus charge of sexual assault, is all a gigantic fraud. At the same time as the arrest was made, and that the Ecuadorian government shamelessly invited UK police into their Embassy to arrest and remove Assange, London Police revealed what has long been known by Assange and his attorneys: that behind it all is the US government, which has for nine years had a secret sealed indictment waiting, an indictment charging Assange with a conspiracy with Army veteran Chelsea Manning to steal and disseminate classified US military documents related to conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A US warrant requesting Assange’s extradition from the UK to the US was also reportedly issued in 2017. As Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept, who worked with Assange and Wikileaks in reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to help Snowden escape US arrest and win asylum in Russia, tweeted early this morning, “If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a US extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs & punish (Wikileaks) for exposing war crimes. Indeed, the specific documents that Assange and Manning released (the latter, released in 2016 from a 32-year military court-martial sentence for disclosing classified military and diplomatic documents after having her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama, but currently in prison again for refusing to testify to a Grand Jury investigating Assange and Wikileaks), exposed grave war crimes by US forces in those two wars. Since Assange seven years ago accepted an asylum offer from Ecuador and its then president Rafael Correa to avoid being extradited by to the US, jumping bail and escaping into the safety of the Ecuadorian Embassy, a shameless campaign by the US government and a complicit mainstream US and UK media to denigrate him, portray him as a sex offender, and deny that he is a journalism, has been underway. As well, during his seven years holed up in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy, which is actually just one floor of an apartment building in a swanky part of London, the US brought intense pressure, including economic threats, against Ecuador trying to get the little Latin American nation to revoke the asylum offer granted to Assange by Correa… For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappenineg!, the uncompromised, collectively run six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/london-police-grab-wikileaks-founder-from-ecuador-embassy-admit-us-seeks-his-extradition/
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen MomentThis 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 Tomgram: Alfred W. McCoy, America’s Self-Inflicted WoundThis 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, Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Behind Fronds of Fakery, Here’s Some Real NewsThis article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. Once upon a time, it was an “invisible government” — or, at least, that’s what David Wise and Thomas Ross called it in their famed 1964 book of that title. Those two journalists, shining |