Don't support either "side" in this
This war is dangerous for humanity and the planet! We shouldn't support either "side."
It's no exaggeration to say that the showdown between Russia and the U.S./NATO bloc has profound dangers for the people of Ukraine. Millions are already facing death and displacement from the immediate incursion of the Russian military. Russia doesn't want NATO at its borders in its mission to control Eastern Europe.
Many hundreds of millions more are endangered by the U.S. missile launchers recently installed in Poland and Romania, on the border of Russia. These are MK 41's, the same weapon the U.S. used thousands of times on people of Iraq, Syria and Yugoslavia. The U.S. wants to encircle Russia with NATO countries in its mission to maintain imperialist dominance.
Stealing from Afghanistan's people
I have such a vivid memory of a long-planned anti-globilization movement protest in Washington DC in late September 2001. Lots of people didn't come; those that did acted in the face of bellicose USA! USA! jingoism emanating from The White House a week before the US invaded Afghanistan.
Bread & Puppet Theater organized a procession of 20 foot tall puppets of women carrying children's bodies, moving slowly, dramatically collapsing to a drumbeat every block or so to convey the message that innocent people will die. It was breathtaking in its reality, and residents of DC stared, captured by the spectacle, as I was.
That nightmare has come true, and worse. After the U.S. spent $300 million per day to dominate Afghanistan, the Biden administration has "withheld" -- called by normal people "stolen" -- $7 billion in Afghan funds held in the U.S.
Call of the Ban Killer Drones Campaign: No armed drones for the German Military
Action month is January, 2022 in the run-up to the vote at the 47th Federal Delegates Conference of the Green Party on 28/29 January 2022 on the possible arming of German military (Bundeswehr) drones.
While the use of armed drones is proliferating around the world, led by the United States and its allies, Germany, almost alone among the industrialized nations, has not added lethally armed drones to its arsenal. Ironically, after last year’s elections when the long standing conservative coalition that governed Germany lost power, leaders of the new coalition of liberal parties made a move to arm their country’s drones. In a coalition agreement at the end of November 2021, the party leaders of the Social Democrat Party SPD, the Green Party and the Free Democrat Party FPD, stated: “Subject to binding and transparent conditions and taking ethical and security aspects into account, we will therefore enable the arming of Bundeswehr (German military) drones during this legislative period.”
Close Guantanamo Now! 20 Years Too Long! Join us January 11 to demand Close Guantanamo Now
Tuesday January 11 4:00 - 6:00 pm
New York Public Library steps, 5th Avenue @ 41st Street
Facebook event: organizations invited to sign on.
Initiated by World Can't Wait. Co-sponsored by War Criminals Watch, NYC War Resisters League, Witness Against Torture, NYC-DSA Anti-War Working, Brooklyn for Peace, Granny Peace Brigade NYC and Peace Action New York State Group. (list in formation).
Confirmed Speakers: Guantanamo attorney Nancy Hollander; Seth Farber, attorney & writer; Debra Sweet for World Can't Wait; Jeremy Varon, Activist & Professor of History.
U.S. actions at this camp are war crimes in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and international law.
Airstrikes allowed America to wage war with minimal risk to its troops.
“No civilian presence”
For Ali Fathi Zeidan and his extended family, West Mosul was in 2016 still the best of many bad options. Their longtime home in a nearby village, Wana, had been taken by ISIS, then retaken by Kurdish pesh merga forces, and — as if that were not enough — it stood just seven miles below the crumbling Mosul Dam, which engineers had long warned might soon collapse, creating a deluge that would kill everyone in its path. The family had avoided the camps for internally displaced people, where they would have faced a constant risk of separation, and found their way instead to the city, to a grimy industrial neighborhood called Yabisat. They moved into a storage facility, divided it up into separate rooms, brought in a water tank, built a kitchen and a bathroom. Though ISIS had taken Mosul, parts of the city were still relatively safe. Now it was home.
The Civilian Casualty Files: Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns Of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes
Azmat Kahn | December 20, 2021
Forward by Debra Sweet:
An extraordinary - as in the top half of the front page, and 5 full inside pages, with photos - investigation series of U.S. military-caused civilian deaths began in The New York Times this weekend.
Readers of this newsletter, which began in 2005, will know that the series headline "Hidden Files Bare Military Failures in Deadly Strikes," fails to convey the fact that failure to protect non-combatants is built in to the unjust, illegitimate, immoral and imperialist wars the U.S. wages.
But it's important to read and digest this series in print, interactive digital and audio formats. If you can't access The New York Times series, scroll down below.
The Times ran journalist Azmat Khan's second piece in the series, "The Human Toll of America's Air Wars."
In the first piece, Khan states:
The World Still Cannot Wait
The world still cannot wait for the United States to cease being the biggest danger to world peace. Please support the message from people living in this country that humanity and the planet come first with your year-end donation.
Twenty years after bombing its way into Afghanistan, U.S. troops left in chaos, with the Taliban back in power and in possession of the weapons with which the U.S. littered the country. Half the population is now in danger of starvation. The U.S. brings disaster to the globe as the Biden administration targets Afghanistan and the region with its “over- the-horizon” force of weaponized drones, bombers, and the CIA in continuing the war of terror. World Can’t Wait joined the Ban Killer Drones coalition toexpose the illegitimacy, injustice and immorality of the U.S. program of weaponized drones and targeted killing.
Click to download/print PDF
World Can't Wait joined BanKillerDrones.org and others in support of whistleblower Daniel Hale.
Join the Guantanamo conference next weekend - and write to your lawmakers about the NDAA
We’re delighted to invite you to take part in an international conference about Guantánamo — "Guantánamo: 20 Years After" — taking place on Friday Nov. 12 and Saturday Nov. 13. The conference is hosted by the University of Brighton in the U.K., and our co-founder Andy Worthington has been helping to organize it, and is a keynote speaker. Check out our article about it here.
$30 Million Minimum in Reparations for Afghan Family Demanded by U.S. National Group Opposing Drone Attacks
Ban Killer Drones, a national network opposed to drone attacks, is calling for reparation payments of at least $3 million for each of the 10 members of the Afghan Ahmadi family killed on August 29, 2021, by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone. The group says thousands of others killed by U.S. drones deserve similar payments, which should be made under the oversight of Congress’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.
“The $3 million U.S. payment to the family of Giovanni Lo Porto when he was killed by a U.S. drone in Pakistan in 2015 sets the minimum standard that the U.S. must meet in compensating families of civilians who are killed by U.S. drones,” said Nick Mottern, of the Ban Killer Drones network. U.S. agrees to pay nearly $3 million to the family of Italian killed in CIA strike.
Never-Ending Injustice: State Secrets and the Torture of Abu Zubaydah
Andy Worthington | October 17, 2021
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of the notorious torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah, for whom the US’s post-9/11 torture program was invented. Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for four and a half years, after his capture in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002, until his eventual transfer to Guantánamo with 13 other so-called “high-value detainees” in September 2006, and he has been held there without charge or trial ever since.
After 20 years, occupation has failed Afghanistan – but our struggle for freedom continues
Twenty years after the U.S. launched their invasion and war, the people of my long-suffering country are right back where we started. After trillions of dollars spent, and hundreds of thousands killed and displaced, the Taliban flag is once again flying over Afghanistan.
As the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s Parliament back in 2005, my experience reflects the failure of the U.S. and NATO war — a policy that used women’s rights as a pretext for occupation but only managed to empower the most corrupt forces in our society.
I survived several assassination attempts because I spoke out and condemned the presence of warlords and criminals in the Afghan government installed by the U.S. occupation. Then I was kicked out of Parliament entirely and forced to live an underground existence.
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