As Trump Orders US Out of Afghanistan, Notorious CIA-Backed Units Will Remain
Marjorie Cohn, Truthout | January 6, 2019
Politicians and pundits alike have roundly criticized Donald Trump for stating he will pull our troops out of Syria and cut US forces in Afghanistan by half. James Mattis immediately resigned as secretary of defense, writing in a letter to Trump, “you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”
As the US military kills civilians in Syria and CIA-led Afghan forces continue to commit war crimes, it appears Trump is doing the right thing in pulling out military troops. But the CIA will remain and grow stronger after the US troops leave. “[A]s American military forces are set to draw down, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency is only likely to grow in importance,” according to The New York Times.
A Measure of How Much has Changed in Two Years
Curt Wechsler | January 9, 2019
Mr. Trump's first Oval Office address felt like a non-event agree The New Yorker writers John Cassidy and Masha Gessen.
"A measure of how much has changed in two years -- how far we have fallen -- is that commentators have stopped saying that Trump is 'Presidential' when he manages to read from the teleprompter," says Gessen. "This isn't because Trump has changed or the commentators have changed. It's because he has redefined what 'Presidential' is."
The Violence Of The U.S. War On Terror
This is not a film review. But see "Vice," starring Christian Bale as "Dick" Cheney. You'll look at this photo differently after seeing the film.
One of the remarkable features of the film is the startling, realistic jumps to the violence of the U.S. war on terror precipitated by Cheney's actions. Cheney co-ordinates the build-up to the attack on Iraq and suddenly the screen is filled with Iraqis being bombed. Cheney authorizes the rendering of a cleric in one of the Baltic states, and bam, the cleric is thrown into a van within seconds, gagged and disappeared. The concepts of human rights and democracy, U.S. style, get brought sharply to the viewer, as a public service.
Close Guantanamo
Rule of Law, Not Rule of Trump
January 11, 2019, marks the 17th anniversary of the opening of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, which was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It also marks the start of the prison's third year under the direction of the Trump administration. At the beginning of the Trump administration 41 people remained imprisoned at Guantanamo. Over the last two years, the Trump administration has released just one individual, leaving 40 people in detention while, at times, signaling interest in expanding Guantanamo. What will happen to the prison and its detainees in the remaining years of the Trump administration? Will anyone else be released? Will the prison ever close?
Is Trump "anti-war"?
Looking to the storms coming in 2019, we consider, how is Trump the same as other U.S. presidents, and how is his regime markedly different, requiring concerted action from us?
Each of the three "war on terror" presidents were and are completely committed to the US empire's domination of the globe through military supremacy. Each declared victory in the illegitimate endless war in their own way. George “W” Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" (2003), Obama did it with "air strikes… taking out ISIL leaders, heavy weapons, oil tankers, infrastructure," promoting a "network of partners" instead of invasions (2015) and, Trump bluntly declared victory over ISIS in Syria, saying "now, we've won" (2018).
Corrupt Spineless Iraqi Legislators Are Right
You’ve got 5,000 armed foreign troops stationed in your country. You don’t say a word until the idiot foreign emperor stages a surprise visit. Then you’re outraged principally because he didn’t notify you or meet with you or put up any pretense that your country belonged to you in any way. At that point you demand that the U.S. occupation of Iraq finally be brought to a bitter better-late-than-never end. And you’re damn right.
Changing Students' Lives To Resist War
Beginning on Monday November 26, we had another very full and meaningful week of We Are Not Your Soldiers visits to NYC high schools and colleges – this time with Marine veteran Lyle Rubin who had been stationed in Afghanistan. Lyle told the story of an important part of his life – how he came to enlist in the Marines, his time in boot camp and a particularly heartrending experience in Afghanistan – to over 300 students and engaged in deep discussion with them about his presentation. The talk began by asking the students to think about whether we have an “enemy” and, if so, who that is and, if not, why are we told we do – and to think about how all this relates to morality, knowing the difference between right and wrong, both as an individual and as a society.
What Our Visits Mean, In Their Own Words
World Can't Wait | December 18, 2018
Nothing we could write could convey more effectively what it means for students vulnerable to joining the U.S. military to hear from veterans conscious of how they could lose their humanity by enlisting. And that’s only half of the story.
Most of the students whose classes we visit, whether in high school or college and despite having lived in a state of war for all or most of their lives, do not know about the seven wars being carried on in their names nor the realities of the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Lyle, John, Miles, Joe and Bruce, via the WeAreNotYourSoldiers project, each spoke to hundreds of students this year, sharing their hard-earned experiences.
William Blum, US Policy Critic Derided by NYT, Dies at 85
You know you’ve lived well—well enough to rattle the establishment—when the New York Times smears you in the obituary it runs about you (FAIR.org, 6/20/13).
That distinction was achieved by William Blum, historian and critic of US foreign policy. Once a State Department computer programmer who aspired to “take part in the great anti-Communist crusade,” he quit government in 1967 out of disgust with the Vietnam War and became a founding editor of the Washington Free Press, one of the first alternative papers of the New Left. In books like The CIA: A Forgotten History (re-released as Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Blum documented the violent and anti-democratic record of the US empire; he was a reference that FAIR frequently turned to when noting what was missing from the corporate media’s version of history.
How did the New York Times (12/11/18) frame this remarkable life? With this remarkable headline:
William Blum, US Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85
'A torrent of ghastly revelations': what military service taught me about America
Training on a base in California, and later serving in Afghanistan, made me confront the reality of American empire, and the injustice that pervades society at home. MY FIRST AND ONLY WAR TOUR took place in Afghanistan in 2010. I was a marine lieutenant then, a signals intelligence officer tasked with leading a platoon-size element of eighty to ninety men, spread across an area of operations the size of my home state of Connecticut, in the interception and exploitation of enemy communications. That was the official job description, anyway. The yearlong reality consisted of a tangle of rearguard management and frontline supervision. Years before Helmand Province, Afghanistan, however, there was Twentynine Palms, California. From the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, I was trained as a lance corporal in my military occupational specialty of tactical data systems administration (a specialty I would later jettison after earning my officer commission in Quantico, Virginia, in 2008). My schoolhouse was the Marine Corps Communication-Electronics School, which was abbreviated as MCCES, pronounced “mick-sess.” For many, the wider location became “Twentynine Stumps” or “the Stumps.” But for me it just became “the Palms.”
“Alexa, Drop a Bomb”: Amazon Wants in on US Warfare
Amazon is seeking to build a global “brain” for the Pentagon called JEDI, a weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created.
Founded in 1994 as an online book seller, Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer, with more than 300 million customers worldwide, and net sales of $178 billion in 2017.
Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the aforementioned “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars acronym — JEDI.
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