Peace and War

By David Swanson

The demise of the antiwar movement has been greatly exaggerated. Working on planning a series of events in Washington, D.C., next month, and related events around the world, I’m finding tons of enthusiasm for organizing and mobilizing to end war. In fact all kinds of events are being organized all the time, from conferences to marches to protests, a peace fleet taking on read more

Once in a while one of the videos somebody emails me a link to turns out to be well worth watching. Such is this one. In it a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union tries to explain to Vladimir Putin why new U.S. missile bases near the border of Russia should not be understood as threatening. He explains that the motivation in Washington, D.C., is not to threaten Russia but to create jobs. Putin responds that, in that case, the United read more

A Letter to Ireland from World Beyond War

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Those of us outside Ireland, and in particular those of us in the United States, have a pressing and urgent responsibility to lend all the support we can to our brothers and sisters in Ireland who are resisting U.S. wars.

Despite Ireland’s officially neutral status and its claim to have not gone to war since its founding in 1922, Ireland allowed the United States to use Shannon Airport during the Gulf War and, as part of the so-called read more

Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and an occasional writer at Consortiumnews.com which has covered recent U.S. propaganda re Russia as well as any media outlet out there. Murray has recently returned from a trip to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives which has read more

In planning an upcoming conference and nonviolent action aimed at challenging the institution of war, with the conference to be held at American University, I can’t help but be drawn to the speech a U.S. president gave at American University a little more than 50 years ago. Whether or not you agree with me that this is the best speech ever given by a U.S. president, there should be little dispute that it is the speech most out of step with read more

Audio here.

If there’s any debate right now in the major U.S. media regarding blowing people up with missiles from drones, it’s about “transparency” (official reporting on who’s killed) or death counts of those people somehow identified as civilians. But unless drones are just a means of vicariously venting rage, or of profiting drone manufacturers, they are — like the wider wars they are part of — supposed to serve some purpose.

Although terrorism keeps increasing read more

In the dialect of Gaza, where drones buzzed and blew things up for 51 days two years ago, there’s an onomatopoetic word for drones: zanana. When Atef Abu Saif’s kids would ask him, during that war, to take them out of doors somewhere, and he would refuse, they would then ask: “But you’ll take us when the zanana stops?”

Saif has published his diary from that time, with 51 entries, called The Drone Eats With Me. I recommend reading one chapter a day. You’re read more

President Barack Obama’s lawyers, working on our dime, have just laid out a 46-page explanation of why current wars are legal. They’ve done so in response to a lawsuit, which has limited the argument in some significant ways.

First, while Obama has bragged about bombing seven nations, this lawsuit deals only with whichever parts of the world ISIS is in. But there is every reason to believe that Obama would make similar arguments for the legality of his other wars.

Second, while Tony read more