A blog about a criminal enterprise
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
It turns out that I can thank former Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich for the fact that U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen began his article-writing career at TomDispatch. That was in February 2017. His first piece was headlined
By Ron Ridenour
Losing Military Supremacy: The myopia of American strategic planning
Author: Andrei Martyanov
Clarity Press, Atlanta 2018
When I first heard of Andrei Martyanov, I was skeptical about his intentions. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR, 1963, he became a naval officer and expert on Russian military and naval issues. He took part in conflicts in the Caucasus. In mid-1990s, he
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
The 47-Minute Presidency
The Reign of King Toot
By Tom Engelhardt
Recently, I did something rare in my life. Over a long weekend, I took a few days away and almost uniquely — I might even say miraculously — never saw Donald Trump’s face, since I didn’t watch TV and barely checked the news. They were admittedly terrible days in which 50 people were slaughtered
The head of NATO is visiting the White House and Congress next week to be publicly praised by the U.S. President and both big political parties. For more on how they love NATO, keep reading.
The foreign ministers of the NATO nations are meeting at the State Department on April 4th.
We’re planning to unwelcome them, and to throw a party for peace and for the nonviolent activist, racial-justice, economic-justice, and peace vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: No
Trump wants to leave 31% of discretionary spending for all things non-military, while Bernie wants to move some unspecified amount of money from militarism to human needs, and Elizabeth Warren believes a budget is a statement of values.
Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no presidential candidate has now or within living memory ever produced a proposed federal budget, or ever been asked in any debate or interview, to even approximate — give or take $100 billion — what they’d like spent where,
Marcela Mulholland is a 21-year-old organizer with Sunrise Movement. Her personal experiences with the impacts of sea level rise in her hometown, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. motivate her to fight for coastal communities everywhere that will be devastated by climate change. She is currently a senior studying Political Science and Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. In addition to being a student, Marcela is an organizer with Divest UF a group dedicated to financially disentangling the University of Florida from toxic industries including fossil fuels and private prisons.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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By Dave Lindorff
Here’s Dave Lindorff being interviewed on Sputnik radio about the implications of the deadly Boeing 737 Max 8 avionics software flaw, the questionable delay in US regulators ordering grounding of the planes, and what it means that the man who oversaw Boeing’s civilian aircraft unit, Patrick Shanahan, has been undersecretary of defense and is not acting secretary of defense, where he’s being investigated by the Pentagon’s inspector general for possible corruption in pushing Boeing military contracts like the upgraded F-15…
To hear this interview of Dave Lindorff, please go to:
https://thiscantbehappening.net/the-boeing-737-max-8-scandal-may-be-the-tip-of-a-bloody-iceberg-of-corruption/
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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The advent of sound recording deep-sixed this age-old thought experiment and offered a definitive answer: Yes!
I’ve got another one for you, though: if you water-torture someone at a secure military compound and no one is around to see it, is it a war crime?
Tricky, right?
Well, what if someone does see it? And what if you admit to it — and to a criminal investigator, no less? And what if you add that you also used electrical torture, too? Is that, in fact, a war crime?
More cut and dried, right?
And what if criminal investigators identified 28 other members of your military unit as having beaten prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks, and water-boarded them? And what if 15 of them actually admitted to those acts? Is that, I ask you, a war crime?
Some people are charged with, tried, or even convicted, of torture: Nazis, Ford Motor Company executives in Argentina, and high-ranking Guatemalan military officers, for example. But others aren’t.
Years ago, when I investigated the particular set of crimes mentioned above that were carried out by U.S. military intelligence personnel in Vietnam, I found that only three of the soldiers involved were even punished. And by punished, I mean that the three received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.
One of the admitted torturers I spoke with was still unrepentant. He explained to me that, were he placed in the same situation again, he would do exactly the same things. And why wouldn’t he? You don’t find Americans in the dock at the International Criminal Court (ICC). But if the Trump administration has its way, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reports so strikingly today, the ICC’s judges and prosecutors might be the ones who find themselves charged and — though it’s a stretch of the imagination — behind bars. And given what we know about the U.S. prison system, that might also mean finding themselves at risk of torture.
“We were… nothing short of criminals in the eyes of everyone except our parents and close friends,” the admitted torturer told me, while complaining about the postwar treatment of Vietnam veterans. But he was never charged, let alone tried or convicted for the torture he admitted to meting out. Will ICC officials one day be convicted in American courts of meting out justice? For the moment, the jury is still out. Nick Turse
How to Make Yourself an Exception to the Rule of Law
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo Defy the International Criminal Court
By Rebecca Gordon
Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time, so it’s easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos. Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone! The Senate agrees with the House that the United States should stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen (and Mitch McConnell calls this attempt to extricate the country from cooperation in further war crimes “inappropriate and counterproductive”)! Whoosh! Gone! Twelve Republican senators
Back before Donald Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article called “Fantasies About Russia Could Doom Opposition to Trump.” Perhaps it is less quixotic, or perhaps it is more, to hope that, after more than two years of being barraged with those fantasies, but with their main focus having publicly flopped, more people will now be open to trying something else. That pre-inauguration article read:
“Trump should be impeached on Day 1, but the same Democrats who found the one nominee who could lose to Trump will find the one argument for impeachment that can explode in their own faces. . . . Meanwhile, we have a man planning to be president later this month whose business dealings clearly violate the U.S. Constitution in terms of not only foreign