Is US Ending the "good" War in Afghanistan?
Debra Sweet | April 23, 2021 The political and military leaders who run the U.S. have real problems in the Middle East. Twenty years of their "war on terror" has failed to establish U.S. control over the region and only spread and strengthened Islamic fundamentalism. Just one of their justifications for attacking Afghanistan - to exact revenge for 9/11- was true, though completely unjustified. The others, to establish "democracy," to "save the women," to end "terrorism," were always designed to satisfy those who think "America equals the good guys."
Biden has been forced to conclude that the U.S. can't "win" this war. The U.S. entered in 2001 with almost no translators who spoke local languages, ignorantly killed local forces who were trying to aid the U.S., tortured and killed prisoners at the notorious U.S. airbase in Bagram and killed hundreds of civilians in night raids and with drones. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking...” This aggressive, imperialist war has been a disaster for the people of Afghanistan. For one example, women in Afghanistan still have one of the highest maternal death rates on the globe.
Call for a Global Ban on Weaponized Drones
Announcing BanKillerDrones, an international grassroots campaign working to ban aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance. Our friend Nick Mottern of KnowDrones.com and other activists decry the spread of drone war atrocities since modern day drone warfare was started in 2001 by the United States, with the extent of human loss and suffering held in secret by the perpetrators, and call for a global ban.
This is the endorsement of the ban from Debra Sweet:
When George W. Bush, then Commander in Chief of the year-old U.S. "war on terror," authorized a Predator drone strike on a car in Yemen in November 2002, the act was shocking and the details hazy for years. The CIA, which ran the operation, the first known targeted killing by Hellfire missile from an armed drone, says the six men killed were "suspected" al-Qaeda members.
Daniel Hale
Debra Sweet | April 14, 2021
We met Daniel Hale in 2013 at the "drone summit," a gathering of activists to stop US drone warfare in Washington DC. He was trained and used by the Air Force in the first years of the secret U.S. drone program, courageously spoke out about it, and was charged with violating the Espionage Act by the Trump Justice Department. Biden's Justice Department was about to try him this month, when he pled guilty to one count of the Act."Unmanned" is a short feature film dealing with the conflicts of a drone pilot...
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US Military Closes Camp 7, Guantánamo’s “High-Value Detainee” Prison Block, Moves Men to Camp 5
In news from Guantánamo, the US military announced yesterday that it had shut Camp 7, the secretive prison block where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other so-called “high-value detainees” have been held since their arrival at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and had moved the prisoners to Camp 5.
Modeled on a maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, Camp 5, which cost $17.5 million, opened in 2004, and its solid-walled, isolated cells were used to hold prisoners regarded as non-compliant. As the prison’s population shrank, however, it was closed — in September 2016 — and its remaining prisoners transferred to Camp 6, which opened in 2006, and includes a communal area.
Camp 7, meanwhile, which cost $17 million, was also built in 2004. Two storeys tall, it was modeled on a maximum-security prison in Bunker Hill, Indiana, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the New York Times yesterday, had “a modest detainee health clinic and a psychiatric ward with a padded cell, but none of the hospice or end-of-life care capacity once envisioned by Pentagon planners.”
Take action to save political prisoners in Iran
World Can't Wait received this appeal from Iranian, American & international advocates for justice.
I am asking you to sign & help. As the appeal says:
In the U.S., we have a special responsibility to unite very broadly against this vile repression by the IRI, and to actively oppose any war moves by the U.S. government that would bring even more unbearable suffering to the people of Iran.
We demand of the Islamic Republic of Iran: FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS NOW
We say to the U.S government: NO THREATS OR WAR MOVES AGAINST IRAN, LIFT U.S. SANCTIONS
An Emergency Appeal
The Lives of Iran's Political Prisoners Hang in the Balance— We Must ACT Now
Xenophobia and Racism: They're in the Republican Party's DNA
Steve Jonas has provided us with a brief background to the Republican Party's history of xenophobia and racism.
At the recent House of Representatives hearing on the mass shooting of Asians in Georgia and more generally on the massive rise in anti-Asian hate crimes since Trump and other Republicans began referring to the COVID-19 pandemic as the "China flu" ( and worse), Cong. Chip (on-his-shoulder) Roy of Texas spoke fondly of lynching as a way to achieve what in his mind passes as justice and then subsequently doubled-down on his estimate of the value of this particular method of racist murder.
Then the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (in both attacking a reporter and using racist tropes, definitely in the running for the "next Trump") blew up when a reporter asked him about the propriety of using terms like "kung flu" or "China virus," giving every indication that he had no problem with the term.
SURVIVORS OF THE MY LAI MASSACRE
It is Sunday night, around 9:00 PM on March 14, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. In two days, it will be the 53rd Anniversary of the My Lai Massacre. Since I was a soldier in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam, I have made three trips back to Viet Nam, which included three trips to the My Lai Massacre site in Quang Ngai Province. Those trips were made in 1994, 2016, and 2018 for the 50th Anniversary.
Since I was in Viet Nam, 50 years have passed – half a century. I have spent most of my adult life recovering from the Viet Nam War (or The American War as the Vietnamese call it). This time of year is always difficult for me, and I am sure it is for countless people I know, whether they were in the military or not. When the My Lai Massacre was first revealed in 1969, and 1970, it drastically changed the course of American opinion about the war, even though some of those changes came slowly, because denial camouflages the Lie. It would take three more years before American troops started coming home, with the official ending of the war on April 30, 1975.
Anti-Asian Violence at Imperialist Scale
Debra Sweet | March 25, 2021
The spike in physical and verbal attacks on Asian American Pacific Islanders in the U.S. is horrific, unacceptable and predictable. Think, for example, that Asians were the first group of human beings specifically excluded from immigrating here in 1882 and, for another example, 74 million people who voted for Trump after he called COVID-19 the "China virus." Anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police in the largest U.S. cities jumped nearly 150% in 2020, says the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
Investigators of crimes start by looking for patterns. What more profound pattern could you find then that of an empire built on the destruction of native peoples and enslavement of millions from Africa and stealing parts of Mexico? The patterns continue from there: the U.S. built into a colonial power by invading and exploiting the Philippines, Puerto Rico and other countries in the Caribbean, Hawai'i and other Pacific islands. The ruling forces saw World War II as an opportunity to expand, becoming an imperialist superpower, controlling the global capitalist economy, knocking out rivals via military invasion, assassinations (Lumumba, for instance) and by economic strangulation. Look at what are called the Vietnam War and the Korean War and what was done to Cambodia and Laos.
Obama said he’d close Guantánamo — these activists are pushing Biden to finish the job
Jeremy Varon | March 17, 2021 This article was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
What should have been an end to the Guantánamo saga in 2012, was only the beginning of more grueling work for this anti-torture coalition.
I remember, as if in a distant dream, repeating through sobs of joy and exhaustion, “It’s over. It’s over.” On live TV President Obama had just signed, as his first official act in January 2009, an executive order mandating the closure of the prison at Guantánamo. To Obama’s right stood a proud Vice President Biden, gently coaching his neophyte boss through the momentous ceremony.
As my tears began to drain away, so too did the sting of years of torture, wars based on lies, and the grotesque contortions of the law making up Bush’s War on Terror. All the work of Witness Against Torture and other anti-GTMO activists — the frigid White House rallies, the endless press releases, the many fasts, the arrests for civil disobedience — had borne fruit. Tortured men could now go home, or stand trial before a fair tribunal.
Meet the Veterans in We Are Not Your Soldiers
UPDATE: You can watch the recoded panel discussion here:
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