War Is A Crime

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 7, 2024

We generally accept that if you do a census and only count the people who answer their doors you miss some people, and that you can calculate an estimate that reliably gets closer to reality than the list of people who answer their doors. Of course it will get closer, the more information you can gather. But those insisting that people who do not answer their doors be treated as not existing are widely understood, not as principled fact checkers, read more

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

Give Donald Trump credit. He’s a genuine record-setter and no one can deny it. After all, he’s now the oldest candidate ever to run for president of the United States and, were he to win in November read more

I had a great time on the Terry Lee Show in Charlottesville VA — I come on about 14 minutes in.
—David Swanson

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 3, 2024

A new book called Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre And The Struggle For An American City’s Soul by Aran Shetterly provides a detailed examination, in historical context, of a largely forgotten incident in which KKK and Nazi shooters (some of them veterans of the war on Vietnam), with the complicity of local and federal “law enforcement,” shot at black people in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five, wounding many, read more

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

Honestly, on October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’s horrific assault on Israel, with 1,200 dead, thousands wounded, those read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 3, 2024
Remarks to Global Peace Summit’s Round Table Conference, October 3, 2024

One obvious step would be for the U.S. government to restore funding of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency). For five reasons.

1. It’s pocket change compared to what the U.S. is spending on militarism — not trillions or hundreds of billions but merely $100 million or so — (Note that the U.S. military spent over $200 million on a public relations stunt of pretending it could build a port to deliver aid by ship to people its weapons and assistance were denying aid by land or air).
2. Various Israeli officials have explicitly stated that they are trying to starve people.
3. The excuse for cutting off the funding a year ago was one of numerous pieces of Israeli propaganda that ought not to have been grounds for cutting off anything if true and as far as anyone knows was made up like so much of the rest of it.
4. UNRWA immediately fired the people accused and later fired more besides.
5. All the other countries that had obeyed the sick Israeli-U.S. demand have since restored funding.

But funding relief to people being bombed and shot and blockaded is of little value if it can’t get to them and if they’re still being killed. Months ago we saw stories of aid being dropped into the sea, resulting in drownings of desperate read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 1, 2024

David Swanson is Executive Director of World BEYOND War.

The Israeli government has been dragging Western weapons and militaries into wars for far too long, putting all of the world — and its global institutions — at risk. The move into Lebanon, creating more dead, injured, traumatized, and homeless already in huge numbers ought to snap some war supporters out of their trance.

The danger of a catastrophic read more

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

Can you even imagine a world where the response of President George W. Bush to al-Qaeda’s acts of horror in September 2001 wasn’t the launching of “the Global War on Terror” which, from Afghanistan and Iraq across the Middle East and deep into Africa, became a global set of disastrous conflicts that might, in truth, have been al-Qaeda’s dream? Well, dream on.

And while read more

By Pacifist Barricade, October 1, 2024

We have the distinct honor of having with us today one of the most serious, dedicated, and steadfast opponents of war in the U.S.

A prominent activist, David Swanson co-founded the website After Downing Street (now WarIsACrime.org), centered on the U.S. congressional inquiry into the Downing Street memo. His activism extended to launching a campaign aimed at impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, notably through the now-defunct read more

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

Pentagon expert William Hartung first wandered into TomDispatch in March 2008, less than seven years after this country’s Global War(s) on Terror were launched, full-scale disasters that were already costing the American taxpayer a fortune and a half — or perhaps, given the subject, all too literally an arm and a leg. As he read more