On November 10, hundreds of people took part in a demonstration in Kabul organized by a group calling itself the Front for National Unity and Opposition to US Military Bases. A spokesman for the movement, Wahid Mozhda, told IWPR that Afghans were being led unawares into a wholly one-sided arrangement.
Since the fairy tale about weapons of mass destruction that can be launched against Western targets “within forty five minutes” is well past it’s sell by date, the trans-Atlantic hasbara industry has dreamed up a new Grim Reaper for Syria, their latest quarry: chemical weapons.
“An execution of a man who was entitled to be treated with dignity and respect and entitled to be treated as any British serviceman or servicewoman would be entitled to be treated in a similar situation.”
“Remember, Dick Cheney is a politician who engaged in some of the worst, most radical and criminal conduct in the last century in the United States and did it all in secret — from lying about the war in Iraq to torturing people, to putting people in cages with no lawyers, to eavesdropping on the American people without the warrants required by law”
On Halloween this year, Toronto will host the man who operated from the “dark side” of U.S. policy. As vice-president of the United States, Dick Cheney was a key architect of a post-9/11 response that featured waterboarding and other acts of torture, a global secret detention program where people were held for years without charge, and “extraordinary rendition,” by which innocent men such as Maher Arar were sent to countries like Syria to be tortured. His legacy of “endless war” continues today.
Chris Hedges speaks about suing the Obama administration for the NDAA, the conspiracy to use Al Qaeda to strip civil liberties and make a police state, the death of Osama Bin Laden, attack on journalists and more in this Buzzsaw interview hosted by Sean Stone.
“We find it very disconcerting that the government of law and order seem so intent on desecrating the legal system, ignoring the safeguards the law provides for all individuals and continues to act unlawfully through its many departments including the MoD.”
In March 2013, reports of a hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay, the US detention camp in Cuba, began to surface. Details were sketchy and were contradicted by statements from the US military. Now, using testimony from five detainees, this animated film reveals the daily brutality of life inside Guantánamo. Today there are 17 prisoners still on hunger strike, 16 of whom are being force-fed. Two are in hospital
What is becoming clearer, as stated by various senior military officers as the recent DSEi arms fair, is a commitment to armed drone technology beyond Afghanistan.
It is not supposed to be awarded to good humanitarians whose work has little or nothing to do with peace, such as most other recent recipients. As with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace which works for almost anything but, in violation of its creator’s will, and as with many a “peace and justice” group focused on all sorts of good causes that aren’t the elimination of militarism, the Nobel has become a “peace” prize, rather than a peace prize.
I have pointed out to you the strong evidence that Anthony Blair and our ally, the USA, have, in the conduct of the Iraq war, committed gravest breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The use of depleted uranium (DU), white phosphorous, mercury, napalm equivalents and other toxins against a civilian population penned up in Fallujah in November 2004, were a significant war crime.
“Lies, disinformation and half-truths”, are how Professor of International Law Francis Boyle describes the Obama Administration handling of the use of Chemical Weapons in Syria. In a news release at the Institute for Public Accuracy, posted August 30, 2013, and titled, A “Dodgy Dossier” Instead of a Congressional Debate?, “The test the Dossier [PDF] uses is ‘high confidence’ — but the appropriate standard by the International Court of Justice (in the Corfu Channel case) is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ The Dossier notes that it does not ‘confirm’ the allegations against Syria. So the U.S. intelligence community refuses to ‘confirm’ that the Syrian government did it.
