When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can’t easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn’t help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because … somehow … it’s tied into what happened on September 11, 2001.
I was once asked after a talk: ‘Do you love America?’ I answered: ‘No’. After pausing for a few seconds to let that sink in amidst several nervous giggles in the audience, I continued with: ‘I don’t love any country. I’m a citizen of the world. I love certain principles, like human rights, civil liberties, democracy, an economy which puts people before profits.’
14 May, 2010 — Killing Hope more about “Be nice to America, or we’ll bring de…“, posted with vodpod
If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers of Sarah ‘Africa is a country’ Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh … If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like ‘Obama the Marxist’ and ‘Obama the antichrist’ … If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: ‘I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime’ … keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as mean-spirited.
8 March, 2010 — William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 79 Informed consent About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: ‘The abortion [...]
Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy; it’s a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it’s more insidious than a conspiracy, it’s what’s built into the system, it’s how the system works.
6 January, 2010 — www.killinghope.org Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign [...]
We should never forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their friends, their families, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.
The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry”. War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”
Picture the scene: Afghanistan, two hijacked tankers filled with highly inflammable fuel, surrounded by a crowd of Afghans eager to syphon off some for free … What’s the last thing you want to do? Right — drop bombs on the tankers. That’s what a German military commander signaled an American drone airplane to do September 4. Kaboom!! At least 100 human beings incinerated.
In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that ‘In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.’ So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that’s come along in quite a while.
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