Peace and War

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I’m going to give this speech tonight to a crowd of drunk young people. If I’m not back by morning, ask around if there have been any “Islamic burials.”

About 10 years ago a bunch of psychotic killers crashed planes into buildings. A tall skinny guy who took credit said he was protesting the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and US support for Israel’s war on Palestinians. That wasn’t exactly going to hold up in a court of law as a justification for mass-murder. read more

My article on the killing of Osama bin Laden has landed more positive Emails in my box than perhaps any other. It seems to be making the rounds. Here it is translated into German along with the English original.
http://warisacrime.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/files/LP07611_040511…

Killing Resolves Nothing

By David Swanson

02 May, 2011
Warisacrime.org

The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the read more

The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being — which despite the pilot’s prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we’ve previously supported has been an ongoing disaster. read more

Of all the 95% of humans who live outside the United States, or any of those within it for that matter, who do you think is most invisible? Whose existence, did we come to hear about it, would be the most incomprehensible and therefore inaudible?

I have a nominee: the 4.8 million Iraqis made homeless by the liberation, the people liberated from their homes, millions of them liberated into exile from their country, afraid to return and with little to return to.

These people are not the most exotic read more

Beneath the noisy blather about where the president was born and the whole superficial pretense of disagreement and fundamental opposition between elected Republicans and Democrats, top Republicans in the House and Senate are attempting to give President Obama and his successors from whichever party absolute power to make war and absolute power to imprison.

Tom Andrews has blogged on this here.

There is legislation in both houses that would update the Authorization to Use Military Force passed a read more

Mitt Romney recently criticized “peacetime spending” in an era in which we have numerous wars going and are devoting about half of discretionary spending to wars and the military.

Netroots Nation has just announced 70 panels of progressive commentators. Of those panels, 69 do not discuss the wars or the military, their moral costs, their economic costs, their environmental costs, or their destruction of civil liberties and representative government.

One panel is called “Means read more

LISTEN HERE.

In the wake of the latest revelations of what everyone always knew, the largest press conference in the history of the United States has been planned for tomorrow in the Nationals Park baseball stadium in Washington, D.C. The powerful people lining up to apologize for having claimed the ongoing War on Iraq has had nothing to do with oil were deemed too numerous to gather in any indoor facility.

Former Congressman David Obey, who screamed at Congressman Dennis Kucinich in a Democratic caucus meeting read more

Before Tahrir Square happened almost nobody predicted that President Hosni Mubarak would be forced out of office by a movement that didn’t pick up a gun. Had President Barack Obama expected that outcome, he might have publicly backed Mubarak’s departure before, rather than after, Mubarak stepped down.

Obama can be seen as overcompensating for that performance in Libya, but there he is placing faith in weapons. Anybody can do that. Egypt still has a long way to go on its path to read more

I like this article at the Examiner, except for all the military advertisements on the page.

Tuesday marks 150 years since the start of the U.S. Civil War. Newspapers everywhere are proclaiming it the deadliest war in U.S. history, the costliest U.S. war in terms of the loss of human life. That claim, like most things we say about the Civil War, is false.

Most humans, it will surprise our newspapers to learn, are not U.S. citizens. World War II killed 100 times as many people as the U.S. Civil War, with World War I not far behind. U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq are among those read more