David Swanson's Blog, page 232
February 21, 2011
February 19, 2011
Last Surviving Nuremberg Prosecutor to Make Important Statement on Legal Status of US Conduct
UPDATE: Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the World War II Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and founding father of the International Criminal Court, will make an important statement on U.S. foreign policy at an event with David Swanson and Sandy Davies in Boca Raton on Feb. 26, 2011.
David Swanson and Nicolas "Sandy" Davies in South Florida on Feb. 26, 2011
David Swanson will discuss and sign copies of "War Is A Lie".
Sandy Davies will discuss and sign copies of "Blood on Our Hands".
3-5 p.m. Saturday, February 26, 2011
Saint Andrews Estates South Auditorium
6045 Verde Trail South
Boca Raton, FL 33433
PLEASE RSVP to nparker0511 at gmail dot com
561-702-4174
Sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America
"While most media continue to ignore the US-installed disaster in Iraq, author Nicolas Davies refuses to do so, and his book 'Blood on our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq' could not be released at a better time. This sweeping work covers US policy in Iraq that spans decades, and is written as a call to action for the US to begin following international law—not just in Iraq, but everywhere. For it was the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq that, more than perhaps anything else, continues to defile what is left of the tattered reputation of the US." -Dahr Jamail
"David Swanson's War Is A Lie may be the most comprehensive antiwar statement available in the English language." — Kevin Young
"Not since General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket has a simpler, more brilliant, or truer book been published." — Geoffrey Millard
"David Swanson despises war and lying, and unmasks them both with rare intelligence. I learn something new on every page." — Jeff Cohen
February 18, 2011
Peace Is a Last Resort
When a satirist published a phony U.S. government report in 1967 that recommended against allowing peace to ever break out, most people seemed to fall for the prank. Members of the news media were either in on the joke or victims. The copy I have is marked up with a yellow highlighter by someone who grew angrier and angrier through the book's pages. Toward the end, when the authors of the "report" advocated reviving slavery, the previous owner of my copy scrawled "BULL SHIT" in all caps across two pages.
Sex, War, and Friendship in Homo Sapiens
Speaking of Sex: An interview with Christopher Ryan
by Barry F. Seidman and Arnell Dowret
The psychologist and co-author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality looks at what the evidence says about humans' "natural" state.
SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT: War is A Lie
by David Swanson
"There has probably never been a war that hasn't been explained as an absolutely necessary, inevitable, and unavoidable last resort."
Making Friends in High Places
by Kathy Kelly, Jerica Arents, and David Smith-Ferri
Three American peace activists meet their young Afghani counterparts.
From THE HUMANIST
They Only Lock Up Heroes at Quantico
If Bradley Manning turns out to be the hero he appears to be, he will not be the first "detained" at Quantico.
In fact, Quantico once locked up the most decorated Marine in history, a Marine who would have been running the Marine Corps rather than getting locked up by it if he had known how to brown-nose the swivel-chair commanders as he called them, a Marine who had helped create Quantico years before, the first senior officer in the U.S. military to be arrested in the 65 years following the Civil War, and a serious fearless principled democratic hero whose heroism had nothing to do with the nasty tasks he took on as a U.S. Marine.
And do you know what they locked him up for? For revealing that Benito Mussolini had run a little girl over in his car and not even stopped.
They Only Lock Up Heroes at Quantico
If Bradley Manning turns out to be the hero he appears to be, he will not be the first "detained" at Quantico.
In fact, Quantico once locked up the most decorated Marine in history, a Marine who would have been running the Marine Corps rather than getting locked up by it if he had known how to brown-nose the swivel-chair commanders as he called them, a Marine who had helped create Quantico years before, the first senior officer in the U.S. military to be arrested in the 65 years following the Civil War, and a serious fearless principled democratic hero whose heroism had nothing to do with the nasty tasks he took on as a U.S. Marine.
And do you know what they locked him up for? For revealing that Benito Mussolini had run a little girl over in his car and not even stopped.
Audio from Counterspin: David Swanson on military budget, Aram Roston on Bloomberg
David Swanson on military budget, Aram Roston on Bloomberg
CounterSpin (2/18/11-2/24/11)
Listen: [mp3] [RealAudio not avalailable]
Note: Please feel free to download the mp3 by right-clicking the mp3 link and choose the "Save Target As" function.
This week on CounterSpin: The federal budget is big news this week, but while your hearing all the calls for cuts, cuts and more cuts, ask yourself, what isn't considered an acceptable target for substantive reductions? Here's a hint: it accounts for more than half of the country's public spending. We'll talk about the budget with activist and author David Swanson.
Also on CounterSpin today, public interest groups and media activists of all stripes lined up to oppose the Comcast-NBC merger. And among the coalition of anti-merger activists was... Bloomberg, the media company owned by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. So what did they want? And did they get it? Journalist Aram Roston took a look at Bloomberg's media policy activism in a new piece for the Nation magazine. He'll join us to talk about it.
Stream this week's show:
LINKS:--David Swanson
--"How Bloomberg Does Business," by Aram Roston (The Nation, 2/28/11)
CounterSpin Homepage
Video: Bread and Puppets Circus Explains Everything - With Music, Magic, and Headless People on Stilts
The U.S. Economy:
Arizona Immigration:
Egypt:
Healthcare:
New York:
Bread and Puppets Circus
Random Row Bookstore
Charlottesville VA
Feb 17, 2011
Video by David Swanson
February 17, 2011
Colin Powell's Own Staff Had Warned Him Against His War Lies
In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball's videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball's unreliability. The trouble is, they did.
Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world's media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.
Hillary's Hypocrisy
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday about the failures of foreign leaders to respect people's freedoms, a 71-year-old U.S. veteran Army officer, a man who spent 27 years in the CIA and delivered presidential daily briefs, a peace activist and proponent of nonviolence, the man who famously confronted Donald Rumsfeld for his war lies, the man who drafted our letter to Spain and delivered it to the Spanish Embassy on Monday, our friend Ray McGovern turned his back in silence. As Clinton continued to speak about respecting the rights of protesters, her guards -- including a uniformed policeman and an unidentified plain-clothed official -- grabbed Ray, dragged him off violently, brutalized him, double-cuffed him with metal handcuffs, and left him bleeding in jail. As he was hauled away (see video), Ray shouted "So this is America?" Clinton went right on mouthing her hypocrisies without a pause.
Tell Hillary Clinton what you think of this behavior at 202-647-4000.
Ray told Rob Kall at OpEdNews what he had been protesting by standing silently with his back turned:
"Hillary is the driving force, together with a few others, behind the wars in Afghanistan. She's one of the big hawks in Iran. When I look at her and her husband that they don't know the first thing about war. I do and so do my fellow Veterans for Peace. I have to make clear that we Veterans for Peace think that her policies are an abomination to the nation, that they are at cross purposes to the country and not everybody should applaud and give her the idea that she's doing the right thing."
"I knew that Hillary knew, at the beginning of the war, that Hillary knew how things would go. There was a young lady who was working as Hillary Clinton's personal staff chief, when she was a senator in 2002 and 2003, was in a class I taught in DC and I'd ask her to give her boss articles I wrote. And she did give them to her. So I know that. She made a political calculation that she needed to be strong because she was a woman even though she knew from us that the unintended consequences would be catastrophic. She knew all that and made that calculation."
"The height of irony, of course, is that was her tragic flaw that let Obama beat her. She supported the war and Obama didn't. She is the height of hypocrisy. When people die because we have hypocrites at the top of our government, that compels me to make a statement in whatever way I can. It was not the theme of her speech that I was protesting. It was her war policies and support of Mubarak."
McGovern told Kall what happened:
"They grabbed me and the shock wore off. There was a real struggle. I shouted, 'This is America.' Then I said, 'Who are you?' This is a mystery to me. Who were they? The guy in the suit was the one who did the damage. He was brutal."
"They took me outside, put two sets of iron handcuffs that pierced my wrists. The bleeding went all over my pants. One guy said, "I pricked my finger" like it was his blood."
"I was bleeding in the car so I said 'I think you need to put some gauze on me.' They handed me to the DC police and they told I was being charged with disorderly conduct. I was booked, fingerprinted, mug shot taken. They put me in a little cell -- must be the same size as Bradley Manning's-- about six by four feet."
"It was about three hours that they held me until they let me out. I had to take a cab to the hospital where they x-ray'd me, treated me and dressed my wounds. Then the doctors told me that since this was an assault on me, I had to inform the police about who had assaulted me. A little humor helped then."
Ray compared this incident to his earlier questioning of Donald Rumsfeld, an incident in which Ray did not stand in silent protest but rather waited for his turn at the microphone and did something U.S. journalists tend not to: asked uncomfortable questions:
"When Clinton started talking about how people beat up and arrested people in Iran, it gave some poetic justice, a great irony, to my standing there and what happened to me then, when she's talking about what happened in other countries and there I am being handled in a vicious way...God knows what would happen next. Maybe some senior would ask her questions [she doesn't take questions]. As bad as Donald Rumsfeld was, he let me speak. He let me speak and engaged me in dialog."
"At the same [Rumsfeld] speech, there was a courageous guy who stood with his back to Rumsfeld the entire speech. They left him completely alone and he walked out at the end, unbothered. Four years later, things have changed.
Tell Hillary Clinton what you think of this behavior at 202-647-4000.
