Of the United Nations’ 18 major human rights treaties, the United States is party to 5, fewer than any other nation on earth, except Bhutan (4), and tied with Malaysia, Myanmar, and South Sudan, a country torn by warfare since its creation in 2011. The United States is the only nation on earth that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is the only country to have pulled out of the Paris
Trump’s new acting Pentagon Secretary Patrick Shanahan: Keep Walking, Nothing Important to See Here
By Dave Lindorff
It doesn’t bode well for accountability or fiscal probity that in unceremoniously shit-canning his Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the petulant President Donald Trump elevated in his stead as acting secretary Mattis’s number two, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan.
If you said, “Shanahan who?” welcome to the club. This was about as invisible a bureaucrat as you could imagine. And little wonder. Shanahan
Talk Nation Radio: Leonard Higgins on Extinction Rebeliion
Leonard Higgins is a member of the Extinction Rebellion U.S. National Coordination Team and was a valve turner two years ago, one of a number of activists who took nonviolent action to shut off pipelines. Now new nonviolent actions are underway.
Learn more: http://rebellion.earth
contact xr@extinctionrebellion.us
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Ringing in a New Year of War
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
On December 9th, the Washington Post covered Donald Trump’s offhand, if long expected, announcement of the ousting of retired Marine General John Kelly from an embattled White House. Its report
U.S. Military Out of Syria
U.S. President Donald Trump has announced his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Syria.
If that happens it will fulfill part of the demand that World BEYOND War has been making since Trump promised nine months ago to get “out” of Syria “like very soon.”
Removing troops from the ground — all of them, not just some — and ceasing base construction, if it happens, will be a start.
Even more important is ceasing to bomb from above.
In addition, alternative approaches need to be launched,
Credit where credit’s due: Trump Does Something Right for Once
By Dave Lindorff
It’s entertaining to read and watch the collective horror being expressed in the US media and the Congress as President Trump unexpectedly calls for a quick end to US military involvement in Syria, where for years US forces and CIA-trained fighters have been wreaking havoc and death and sowing chaos in a doomed effort to oust Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad from power.
There’s the New York Times, still grimly trying to gin
A Shift: Repudiating War on Yemen – Kathy Kelly
Photo: Houthi-allied tribesmen demonstrating in Yemen for peace talks – Hani Mohammed/AP
December 19, 2018
Twenty years ago, a small delegation organized by Voices in the Wilderness lived in Baghdad while U.S. cruise missiles attacked more than 100 targets in Iraq. Following four days of bombing, known as “Operation Desert Fox,” our group visited various Iraqis who had survived direct hits. One young girl handed me a large missile fragment, saying “Merry Christmas.”
An engineer,
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, On Board the USS Detention
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
After six all-American decades in business, Toys “R” Us crashed in 2018, closing its 735 U.S. stores and filing for bankruptcy. As it happens, however, the Washington-branded outfit, Mistreatment and Misconduct “R”
“It Means What We Say It Means”: The Quiet Death of Limitations on the Self-Defence Excuse in International Law
William S. Geimer
Because so many of us are committed to nonviolence, in our own lives and in international affairs, we sometimes do not pay sufficient attention to the reality that self-defence is the only recognized exception to the use of lethal force in both contexts. That inattention is unfortunate because, as we focus elsewhere, internationally recognized limitations on claims of self-defence are disappearing. If those limitations survive and are honoured, wars will not end immediately
And So This Is Christmas
Christmas Day. Very late on this day and into the morning of the 26th in 1776, George Washington led a surprise night crossing of the Delaware River and bloody pre-dawn attack on unarmed hung-over-from-Christmas troops still in their underwear — a founding act of violence for the new nation to proudly remember as the progenitor of either the crimes of its “special” forces all over the globe or of peace on earth, I can never recall which.
A more useful memory is certainly that of the