Uncategorized

United for Peace and Justice, Largest Peace Coalition in U.S., Abandons its Agenda in Order to Avoid Working for Accountability and Prosecutions

At a time when more and more organizations are speaking up for accountability, including AfterDowningStreet, Democrats.com, Progressive Democrats of America, Code Pink, Center for Constitutional Rights, Robert Jackson Steering Committee, National Accountability Network, People for the American Way, American Civil Liberties Union, American Freedom Campaign, read more

By David Swanson

I’ve only read a fraction of the books written on the war/occupation of Iraq, and even those are a large pile. It’s tough to choose the best one, but one of the most readable and informative has got to be “Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad,” by Oliver Poole. This is also perhaps the book most likely to engage war supporters and make them think without being didactic and without pulling any punches.

The title is accurate enough, but the book describes read more

By David Swanson

Some months back, United for Peace and Justice held a big conference in Chicago for three days, and hundreds of us from all over the country spent most of those three days voting on the language to go in the documents that would determine what UFPJ would work on in the coming year and a half, especially the program document. In past years, I hadn’t bothered to push for inclusion of accountability, but this year I did. (In the past UFPJ would refuse to work on things that read more

By David Swanson

I wrote recently about the possibility of outgrowing the use of war. Today I got a book in the mail that makes a strong argument intended as a tool for ending war. The book is called “Will War Ever End: A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century” by Captain Paul K. Chappell, U.S. Army. It’s short, more of a hardcover pamphlet than a book, but it is packed with ideas.

Chappell argues that cooperation, love, and sacrifice for friends and loved ones read more

By David Swanson

If we can move beyond torture, do we not have a responsibility also to think for a moment about the obvious fact that torture is not the cruelest thing we do? Torture offends us, in part, because the torturer is not at risk, but neither are most pilots dropping bombs. And how exactly does the risk taken by ground troops mitigate the suffering of those they wound, kill, and terrorize? Hanging someone by the wrists offends us, and yet we might rather have it done to us than be read more