Author name: davidswanson

200 Years of Standing Up to U.S. War Lies

By David Swanson

Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., have edited a new collection of writings called “We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now.” Read it and weep … and cheer. Weep because we’ve been lied into wars in very similar ways for two centuries and have had to discover the deception anew each time. Cheer because some people have been there to denounce the lies on the spot every time, and their ranks have steadily grown.

In 1812, read more

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"No Blank Check" or "No %$#!*@ Check"

By David Swanson

The last time the Democrats all started bleating “No blank check – No blank check” it meant only one thing. They were signing a check and scribbling a bunch of nonsense in the memo line.

If history is any guide, we can expect a bill to come out of Congress requiring that the Secretary of the Treasury make a report to Congress within three months on all areas covered by the legislation, with the exception of those he chooses not to report on.

In particular, he will read more

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We Can Stop Paulson's Plunder

By David Swanson

There does not seem to be any way we are going to avoid shelling out a major amount of money to save banks from the unregulated greed of bankers. Dean Baker and Doug Henwood and every person with any economic expertise whom I find credible predicts disaster if we don’t.

But, as Baker pointed out on Democracy Now! this morning, the bailout can punish those responsible rather than rewarding them. It can also be done without creating new dictatorial powers for the executive read more

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Jane Mayer Boosts John McCain as Torture Opponent

By David Swanson

On Monday morning at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, Jane Mayer, New Yorker reporter and author of “The Dark Side,” lavishly praised John McCain for passing a legislative ban on torture. She did so in a town-hall Q and A full of lots of very useful insights. And much later in the discussion she did acknowledge that McCain opposes habeas corpus and supports the use of certain “interrogation techniques” by the CIA.

But, read more

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A War Criminal in Academia

By David Swanson

The Miller Center on Public Affairs at the University of Virginia has invited a war criminal to speak on October 27, 2008, on the topic of “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism.” Georgetown University employs the very same war criminal as a “Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy.” Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government has made him a “Belfer Center Visiting Scholar.” read more

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The Eight Year Bailout

By David Swanson

Every time there’s a new Cheney-Bush scandal, every time we discover that Dick Cheney lied to Dick Armey, or another top Iraqi informed the White House there were no weapons, or another missile kills another large family in Afghanistan, or the wars in Pakistan and Iran get out of control before we’d realized they’d begun, or we discover that Cheney’s lawyer signed the Attorney General’s name to an authorization to search Democrats’ body cavities, read more

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Viewing the Constitution from the Right

By David Swanson

Bruce Fein’s new book “Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy,” is written by someone who admits he voted for Bush and Cheney twice, supported the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito with no apparent regrets, proposes Robert Bork as a model justice, admires Rehnquist and Scalia, supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton and wanted him convicted, served as associate deputy attorney general to Ronald Reagan read more

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Speak With Ann Wright and Emma's Revolution Tonight Online and On Radio

Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army colonel and retired official of the U.S. State Department, who publicly resigned the day the United States invaded Iraq. She has led the peace movement since that day. She is the author, with Susan Dixon, of DISSENT: Voices of Conscience: Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq.”

Emma’s Revolution is the duo of award-winning, activist musicians, Pat Humphries & Sandy O.

Showtime: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 – 8:00 p.m. – read more

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What You Can Do to Put Bush and Cheney Behind Bars

By David Swanson

Remarks on September 14, 2008, at Justice Robert Jackson Conference on Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals, Andover, Massachusetts.

I want to thank Dean Lawrence Velvel and also Sherwood Ross and Jeff Demers for putting this event together.

These remarks are posted at the top of AfterDowningStreet.org in a version that has links to materials and action pages that I reference. So you don’t have to catch everything I say.

I want everyone in this read more

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Can Bush Pardon Himself?

By David Swanson

Can President Bush pardon himself of crimes like warrantless spying, torture, and aggressive war? Can he pardon his subordinates for following his instructions, and do so before they’re even indicted? There’s a good chance he’ll try it. There’s also a chance some Congress members will preemptively push back against such preemptive pardons, by legislating limitations on pardons, by introducing an article of impeachment, or simply by staking out a public read more

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