War Is A Crime

Hear me out.

While Saudis have threatened Canada with a 9/11 attack, the U.S. has moved on to blaming 9/11 on Iran.

Al Qaeda, despite being Saudi in origins and ideology, was easily tied to Afghanistan, then Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, the Philippines, and Yemen, and now Iran. The potential is almost as endless as with Communism in the good old days.

Without Al Qaeda the United States would not be whole. With it, all is in perfect balance. If there were no Al Qaeda we’d have to invent one.

In read more

David Gallup is President of the World Service Authority, a global public service human rights organization founded in 1954. Previously he was a Dean’s Fellow at the Washington College of Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, where he researched asylum and international human rights issues, developed and maintained a human rights document library, coordinated a human rights education workshop and represented asylum applicants. For fifteen years, he was the Secretary of the United Nations read more

By Dave Lindorff

            Economists say they are stumped by a mystery: Since the US economy is doing so well, and unemployment is down to below 4%, which many argue is close to “full employment” in historic US terms, why is it that wages are not growing, and in fact, are lower in real dollars than they were in 1974, almost half a century ago.

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            Reading articles like these read more

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

It looks like TomDispatch may have a few less readers from now on. Perhaps it will surprise you, but judging by the mail I get, some members of the U.S. military do read TomDispatch — partially to check out the range of military and ex-military read more

Last May I was in Russia when fascists held a rally in my hometown of Charlottesville, not to be confused with their larger rally which followed in August. At the May rally, people shouted “Russia is our friend.” I was on a Russian TV show called Crosstalk the next day and discussed this. I also discussed it with other Russians, actual friends in the human sense. Some of them were completely bewildered, read more

By Dave Lindorff

            Democrats in the US Senate showed themselves to be just another war party this week, with 40 of their number out of 47 voting to pass a record $717-billion military budget for FY 2019. Only seven Democrats (Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, D-MA, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, D-OR, Kamala Harris, D-CA, Dick Durbin, D-IL, and Kirstin Gillibrand, D-NY) and independent Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democratic Party, voted against read more

By David Swanson, director of World BEYOND War

Now being planned and built in Washington, D.C., which is already just about coated in monuments to wars and particular warriors, are monuments to: World War I, the Gulf War, Native American fighters in wars, African Americans who fought in the U.S. war for independence, and the War on Terrorism, as well as one to Eisenhower the Warrior.

That War on (make that “of” — an easy alteration) Terrorism monument is supposed to be built by 2024, and the read more

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

Two weeks ago, another Trump business went down in flames. Caught in the whirlpool of her father’s presidency, with major department stores and other retail distributors continuing to drop her brand under pressure from consumer boycotts here and in Canada, read more

Since the advent of the Trump administration, large numbers of Americans have been aghast at its narrow nationalist approach to world affairs. But many of them are also uneasy about the alternative championed by the foreign policy Establishment.

The Trump “America First” approach has largely dispensed with American-led alliances of the past read more

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

Here are a couple of questions for you: If, in this country, terrorism is to be fought by travel bans, if (as Donald Trump once tweeted) “we don’t want ‘em here,” then why are all the travel bans aimed at Muslims? If the most threatening terror types shouldn’t be traveling either to or in read more