Chicopipe, Nicaragua, August 1985: Lest We Forget What Our Wars Really Mean
My wife Lucy and I lived in Nicaragua (1985-1987) during the Contra War of the 1980s as members of the long-term team of Witness for Peace. Our work was to document the effects of the war in rural...
That tension—between the ideal of the United States as a leading champion of democracy on the one hand and a leading destroyer of democracy on the other—remains the often-unacknowledged fault line running through American politics today.- Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and...
Colombia’s recently inaugurated right-wing President Abelardo de la Espriella is moving rapidly to transform Colombia into a neo-colonial outpost after taking office in early August, giving the U.S. permission to enter Colombian territory under the pretext of “fighting drug cartels.”
The Trump administration is making Colombia a centerpiece of his...
Rotten food, overflowing toilets into bunking areas, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscated cell phones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles, infrequent mail, and social media closed down, were just some of the issues that military families identified at the national conference of Veterans For Peace.
Spouses...
In August 1991, journalist Danny Casolaro was found dead in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, West Virginia, hotel room with his wrists slashed and cuts so deep it severed a tendon.
Casolaro had been investigating a web of CIA corruption in the 1980s linked to the Iran-Contra scandal and theft...
Political legitimacy thrives on competence and executing the people’s will—not on money and endless election campaigns
Long before the West ever seriously discussed equal opportunities, sophisticated concepts of meritocratic selection already existed in China. The Tang Dynasty state, in particular, is considered an early example of a system based on...
Named after a U.S. intelligence agent who was allegedly killed by the Chinese Communists during the Chinese Civil War, the John Birch Society was an extreme right-wing organization that regularly warned about communist subversion of U.S. society from within.
According to Republican political operative Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s father Fred...
Perverse system represents a 21st century high-tech version of Robert S. McNamara’s infamous body count that led to so many atrocities during the Vietnam War
The Ukrainian government operates an “Amazon for the military,” called Brave1 Market, that awards military units “e-points” for uploading videos generated by drone strikes.
In return,...
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) recently issued a memo which states: Cuba is not Venezuela. What does that mean? “The same people who keep ’57 Chevrolets on the road with a coat hanger will wreak havoc against a foreign-imposed regime.”
In 1975, Jamaica’s socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley expressed support for...
On September 5, 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett published an article in London’s Daily Express, “The Atomic Plague,” which helped reveal to the world the horrific effects of the atomic bomb that had been dropped over Hiroshima.
Burchett estimated that 53,000 people were directly killed, with 13,000 having been seriously...
