View inside Iran

This is not the views of Iran that the American Government wants you to see. They would prefer that you see a grotesque cartoon version of Iran that makes you scream for wide scale military violence. When the Soviet Union aimed thousands of long-range missiles tipped with nuclear bombs at us, we acted with restraint and some intelligence, like adults, but we apparently no longer have that capacity.

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Inside look at collateral damage

Many of us have wondered what really happened to the Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.Look what was accidentally left behind in Iraq, as reported by the New York Times: Interview transcripts describing the conduct of American soldiers serving in Iraq. One question these interrogation transcripts raise is why these sorts of documents should have ever be considered classified. Their disclosure illustrates the abject immorality of the Iraq occupation, rather than revealing any particular strategy or tactics. Thus, it would appear that they were kept secret in order to help pretend that the United States does not do the sorts of horrific things that it does. Until their recent disclosure, the secrecy allowed us to maintain that the United States is the "greatest country in the world" regardless of the facts.

But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand. In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine. Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”
Why aren't similar records being maintained and disclosed to the public?
[Maj. Gen. Thomas Richardson]said that over the course of several weeks he had burned dozens and dozens of binders, turning more untold stories about the war into ash. “What can we do with them?” the attendant said. “These things are worthless to us, but we understand they are important and it is better to burn them to protect the Americans. If they are leaving, it must mean their work here is done.”
In your name and my name they carried on this war under false pretenses. In your name and my name they keep atrocities secret.

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Larry Wilkerson discusses proposed military powers as “the road to tyranny.”

Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, indicates that the National Defense Authorization Act (that passed the Senate) gives the military power for indefinite detention without trial is therefore a draconian violation of our rights. In this interview, it is pointed out that the highly offensive provision of the proposed new law that allows the U.S. military to detain and prosecute American citizens was inserted into the proposed legislation at the insistence of Barack Obama.

Continue ReadingLarry Wilkerson discusses proposed military powers as “the road to tyranny.”

The dark side of the new military authorization bill

Glenn Greenwald spells out the concerns we should all have with the new military authorization bill (2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)), well on its way to passage:

Here are the bill’s three most important provisions:
(1) mandates that all accused Terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; it also unquestionably permits (but does not mandate) that even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil accused of Terrorism be held by the military rather than charged in the civilian court system (Sec. 1032); (2) renews the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with more expansive language: to allow force (and military detention) against not only those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and countries which harbored them, but also anyone who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” (Sec. 1031); and, (3) imposes new restrictions on the U.S. Government’s ability to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo (Secs. 1033-35).
There are several very revealing aspects to all of this. First, the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

Continue ReadingThe dark side of the new military authorization bill