August 2011

That sounds like a crazy question, doesn’t it?  Why would President Obama denounce Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Well, the reason I ask is that he’s done it before.

Really?  But surely he wouldn’t do it on such a solemn occasion? 

Well, the time he did it before was in a Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.

When President Barack Obama joined the ranks of Henry Kissinger and the other gentle souls who have received Nobel Peace Prizes, he did read more

The Military Industrial Complex at 50 is adding speakers and participants. 

The lowest rate for registering ends September 1st, so register now:
http://warisacrime.org/registermic

New speakers:

Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Mr. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at Huffington Post. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen’s read more

http://antiwar.com/radio

David Swanson, author of War is a Lie, discusses “The Military Industrial Complex at 50” national conference in Charlottesville, VA from September 16-18; the paltry defense spending cuts decried by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as a “doomsday mechanism” that will endanger national security; how Swanson helped turn former Congressman Bill Delahunt against the wars; and Paul Krugman’s half-serious plan to boost the economy by preparing for an alien invasion.

read more

Leon Panetta, who holds the position that we used to more usefully call “Secretary of War,” makes a weak case.  Panetta considers $350 billion over 10 years, or $35 billion per year, to be serious cuts to the national security budget.  But consider the budger from which that is to be cut.  It includes, each year, about $545 billion for the “base” military budget, at least $200 billion extra each year for wars (Panetta uses Afghanistan and Libya as reasons read more

Former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism Richard Clarke suggests that former CIA Director George Tenet blocked the sharing of information within the government on two members of al Qaeda in the United States, information that Clarke believes could have prevented 911. The CIA admits it knew about the two future hijackers but claims the Director was not informed.

“In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel (including FBI agents on detail read more

By David Swanson with Shepherd Johnson

The U.S. military is a permanent and pervasive presence in Virginia. Were the state of Virginia to ban participation in wars of aggression, weapons sales to brutal dictatorships, and the manufacture of aggressive and illegal weapons, the Military Industrial Complex would be obliged to help itself to many billions of public dollars just to cover the cost of moving operations to the other 49 states or abroad.

The Pentagon and all of its surrounding weapons corporation read more

Bunnatine (Bunny) H. Greenhouse is a former procurement executive and chief contracting officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 2004-2005 she revealed waste and fraud in secret no-bid contracts for Halliburton in Iraq. She was demoted and marginalized in retribution. In 2011 a U.S. District Court awarded her $970,000 in restitution.

Greenhouse will be speaking in Charlottesville with over 20 other speakers on the Military Industrial Complex at 50.  To attend, you need to register read more