by James Petras / May 5th, 2008
General Petraeus: President Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders promised to end their support for the special groups but the nefarious activities of the Quds Force have continued.
Senator Joseph Lieberman: Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?
General Petraeus: It certainly is… That is correct.
– General Petraeus testimony to the US Senate, April 8-9, 2008.
‘The Israeli flag is proudly displayed …
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad / May 5th, 2008
Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
Edited by Nicholas Noe
(Verso: 2007), 420 p
ISBN: 978 1 84467 153 3
Since the assassination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading Hizbullah operative, a sense of foreboding once again grips Lebanon. The Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah says the bombing foreshadows Israeli aggression and has declared his willingness to wage ‘open war’ should there be another invasion. Fighting words are not uncommon to the region; leaders often compensate for lack of action with bravado. However, no one is ready to discount the significance of Nasrallah’s statement. Why?
As the Israeli Air …
by Susan Rosenthal / May 5th, 2008
An exhausted young woman tells me that she must be a bad mother. In her mind, good mothers feel joy, not despair. I assure her that she is not to blame; she has been betrayed. Capitalism celebrates mothers in theory and deprives them in practice.
Across the globe, malnutrition and lack of medical care cause more than three million babies to die at birth every year. Every year, more than half a million women die in pregnancy or childbirth, and millions more are crippled.
Poverty and inequality cause most maternal deaths. In 2000, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 women was …
by Tom Burghardt / May 5th, 2008
Newly declassified documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from the Department of Defense (DoD) expose the role played by psychologists in the illegal interrogation of prisoners at CIA and Pentagon detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
According to ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh,
The documents reveal that psychologists and medical personnel played a key role in sustaining prisoner abuse — a clear violation of their ethical and legal obligations. The documents only underscore the need for an independent investigation into responsibility for the systemic abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad.”Newly Unredacted Report Confirms …
by Ron Jacobs / May 5th, 2008
Naomi Klein’s 2007 release Shock Doctrine addressed in a rather mild way the dependence of the capitalist economy on cataclysmic events for its progress. These events displace millions and cause personal hardship for an even greater number while they ensure capitalism’s survival. A century ago, there was another woman who took this observation further and devoted her life to ending capitalism. Her name was Rosa Luxemburg. She was a Polish woman who dedicated her life to socialist revolution and was murdered by the 1919 social democratic government of Germany for her uncompromising belief in that …
by Joe DeRaymond / May 5th, 2008
I think it was the wind, the hot, dusty wind. When I realized that the wind was carrying lead, and that the entire city of San Salvador was being exposed from that blasted Record Battery operation in San Juan Opico, El Salvador, my brain internalized the situation, and I felt that I was stricken with lead poisoning. I had a severe spiking, headwrapping headache for day after day, then began to suffer bouts of vomitting. I became weak, lost all appetite, and became very sensitive to light and noises. Even talking, caused spasms of pain in my skull.
In this condition, …
by Dan Lieberman / May 3rd, 2008
A century old conflict between the state of Israel and stateless Palestinians, many of whom have been dispossessed from lands that created the Israel state, has precipitated a argument: Is it preferable to have two states living side by side or have one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River that includes Jews and Palestinians without prejudice and with equal rights for all?
Those who propose a single-state do so because they sense the two-state solution is nonviable and those who propose two-states do so because they sense the one-state solution is unacceptable. The argument is doomed to …
by Olivia Snaije / May 3rd, 2008
LONDON — Anyone who has brought up the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a social gathering will have realized that it has the capacity to elicit violence even among those who aren’t directly involved. So it is easy to imagine how the spiral of violence is an every day occurrence on the ground in the region itself. But non-violent resistance in the occupied territories appears to be gaining a certain momentum, and some Palestinians are coming to the conclusion that this form of resistance is a more efficient way of getting their message across.
Demonstrations and court cases launched by …
by Stephanie Westbrook / May 3rd, 2008
Just when it seemed things could get no worse on the Italian political landscape following the first round of elections, run-off elections this past Sunday and Monday proved the contrary. But the northern city of Vicenza, home to a vibrant citizens’ movement against a second US military base in their city, proved to be the silver lining.
Round One
In the mid-April elections that came after the collapse last January of the center-left government led by Romano Prodi, the center-right coalition led by media magnate, billionaire and staunch Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi not only beat out former Rome Mayor and leader of …
by Greg Moses / May 3rd, 2008
The thing about courthouse reporting is the stories come packaged for delivery. For a thirty-dollar check and a five-minute wait, the clerk at the federal courthouse will hand you a document whose news value comes pre-certified by affiants with impeccable credentials, signed off by a U.S. Magistrate Judge.
“That’s sixty pages,” she says, not meaning to remind you of the audio thud that television producers delivered yesterday when they dropped this report in front of the camera from two feet above the desk.
Walking back out the silent stone building, past the metal detector, wishing the courteous guardian a nice afternoon, …
by Cyril Mychalejko / May 3rd, 2008
Less than 24 hours after President Bush met with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom at the White House on Monday, a worker from a union that filed a trade complaint with Washington against the Guatemalan government was murdered.
Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, a banana worker, was assassinated while working at a farm owned by a subsidiary of Del Monte. Cruz Hernández’s Union of Izabal Banana Workers (SITRABI), was one of six Guatemalan unions who, along with the AFL-CIO, filed a complaint allowed through labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on April 23, charging that the …
by Eileen Fleming / May 3rd, 2008
I believe that as soon as people want peace in the world they can have it. The only trouble is they are not aware they can get it. It’s all down to you, mate …All we are saying is give peace a chance…A ll you need is love… Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.
– John Lennon
In a country that possesses 11,000 nuclear weapons with many in excess of 20,000,000 tons of TNT [the …
by Jerry D. Rose / May 3rd, 2008
The “CREEPS” are at it again. The Watergate dirty tricksterism of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (Nixon) is back in business, if it ever went out of it. Once the nominee of the party (McCain) was determined, GOP operatives have focussed their campaigning on trying to manipulate the Democratic primaries to their benefit. By all present indications, their operations are succeeding quite nicely, thank you.
Like all shady “operations,” this one needed to operate in the shadow of public awareness; but the bean-spiller Russ Limbaugh spilled a bowl of them just after the March 4 Democratic …
by Joel S. Hirschhorn / May 2nd, 2008
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say they believe in giving Americans universal health care. I don’t believe them. Anyone who takes the time to understand universal health care should conclude that only a simple single payer system will reform the current outrageous system that benefits the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
The contorted plans from Clinton and Obama are not sufficient reforms. And what John McCain has proposed is sheer nonsense and by itself should cause any conscious American to avoid voting for him.
Fights for health care system reform are centered in Congress, as if legislators …
by Paul A. Moore / May 2nd, 2008
During his eight-year reign as governor of Florida, Jeb Bush seeded the ground for the bitter harvest we Floridians are about to reap. His handiwork is poised now to devastate this state and visit unprecedented suffering on its people. It will be a nightmare, part of which will imperil the public schools, the operation of local governments and the state retirement system.
The government of the State of Florida realizes most of its revenues by way of sales and use taxes, intangible taxes and corporate income taxes. Sales and use taxes are the most regressive and hit poor, working and retired …
by William Blum / May 2nd, 2008
Since I gave up hope, I feel better.
More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
– Woody Allen
Food riots, in dozens of countries, in the 21st century. Is this what we envisioned during the post-World War Two, moon-landing 20th century as humankind’s glorious future? It’s not the end of the world, but you can almost see it from here.
American writer Henry Miller (1891-1980) once asserted that the role of the artist was to “inoculate …
by Michael Nolan / May 1st, 2008
Norman Podhoretz, an impassioned cheerleader for war with Iran, reached heights of apocalyptic sang-froid scaled only by the criminally insane when he predicted the following scenario, in the event of a US attack on Iran: “It [Iran] would attack Israel with missiles armed with non-nuclear warheads but possibly containing biological or chemical weapons. There would be a vast increase in the price of oil, with catastrophic consequences for every economy in the world, very much including our own. The worldwide outcry against the inevitable civilian casualties would make the anti-Americanism of today look like a love-fest.”
But Hillary Clinton isn’t …
by Ashley Smith / May 1st, 2008
The trumpeted success of the Bush administration’s surge was built on flimsy foundations. They were, principally, the employing of the Sunni resistance to fight al-Qaeda, effectively bribing a large section of the Sunni resistance to stop attacking the U.S.; Muqtada al-Sadr’s unilateral cease-fire, which temporarily silenced the Mahdi Army; and the fact that a great many areas formerly prone to sectarian violence had already been cleared of Sunnis or Shia. All of these conditions were provisional. Seemingly unaware of the Iraqi prime minister’s tenuous position, Bush supported Nouri al-Maliki’s disastrous attack on Sadr’s Madhi Army in Basra at the end …
by Jason Leopold / May 1st, 2008
At least half-a-dozen active-duty military officials have been working closely with a task force headed by the far-right fundamentalist Christians planning religious events at military installations around the country to commemorate Thursday’s National Day of Prayer.
In working directly with the National Day of Prayer (NDP) Task Force and agreeing to work as event coordinators, these military officials not only violated constitutional provisions governing the separation of church and state but they also signed an oath that states they “believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God” and that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God …
by Glen Ford / May 1st, 2008
Barack Obama’s strategy to win the White House was to run a “race-neutral” campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race. The very premise — that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy — demanded the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty. From the moment Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is no white America, there is no black America,” it was inevitable that the candidate would one day declare the vast body of black opinion illegitimate.
That day came on …
