By David Swanson

Congress will soon vote on whether to spend another $33 billion of our money to escalate a war in Afghanistan that makes us less safe, violates the basic rule of law, kills innocent people, puts our children in debt, empowers the oil industry, and protects the heroin industry. The only decent, legal, or humane thing a member of Congress could do would be to publicly and privately whip his/her colleagues to vote No and defeat the bill. No caucus is engaged in that effort. As read more

By David Swanson

It’s hard to imagine a desirable and sustainable world with the world’s largest naval base still in it, but it’s hard for a lot of people in Norfolk, Virginia, to imagine it gone. The military is not just the force of good that selflessly patrols the world, slaughtering evildoers for the betterment of humanity, but it’s also the primary source of jobs.

On Wednesday I visited a new coffee house in Norfolk called OffBase. read more

By David Swanson

If a new Daniel Ellsberg were to release a new pile of Pentagon Papers exposing the lies behind the Afghanistan War, or even the past few decades of misdeeds by our country in that one, the result would differ from what happened to Ellsberg in a number of stark ways. No newspaper would touch it. The whistleblower would go to prison. Little of substance would be added to what we already know and tolerate. Nobody would be impeached. And no war would end.

These thoughts occurred read more

www.narocinema.com

A high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, Ellsberg concluded in 1971 that the war was based on decades of lies, and leaked 7,000 pages of top secret documents to The NY Times—a daring act of conscience that leads directly to Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War. A riveting story of how this one man’s profound change of heart created a landmark struggle involving America’s newspapers, its president and the Supreme read more