Stephen Lendman

Indonesia's National Armed Forces (TNI), especially its thuggish Kopassus Special Forces Command, has a long, sordid human rights record, including political killings and massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians in East Timor, Aceh, Papua, and elsewhere in the country.

In response to the November 12, 1991 Santa Cruz cemetery massacre of over 270 demonstrators in Dili, East Timor's capital, Congress restricted Indonesia's TNI from receiving International Military Education and Training (IMET). It brings foreign military officers to America for what's taught at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA, renamed WHINSEC) - namely, the latest ways to kill, maim, torture, oppress, exterminate poor and indigenous people, overthrown democratically elected governments, suppress popular resistance movements, assassinate targeted leaders, and work cooperatively with Washington to solidify hard-right rule, intolerant of democratic rights, social justice, and progressive change.

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Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

By making a 6-hour unannounced trip to Afghanistan last night, Obama proved that his military strategy and surge of 30,000 troops, his morale-boosting propaganda, all have failed to make a dent.

The Mujahideen have further driven the enemy into the corner, to the extent that now he is not able to visit Afghanistan in the light of the day. He comes during the night and hurries back in the darkness, ironically acting like a thief.

Similarly, the brief speech of Obama to American soldiers in a military base, being dotted with his low- pitched and jittery-fraught voice was demonstrating the scope of the American military's fear and mistrust in Afghanistan. There was no word in Obama's speech, indicating any military achievement or at least giving good news to troops to boost their morale. Obama admitted in clear terms that their enemy (Taliban) were a determined and resolute opponent. However, he claimed that they would not defeat the Americans.

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Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood views the Easter message of Gaza’s courageous Fr Manuel Musallam in which he delivered a blistering attack on Israel’s occupation and its rape of the holy sites, and a damning indictment of the silence of the cowards in the West.

Fr Manuel Musallam recently retired at the age of 71 after serving as the parish priest of the Holy Family Church in Gaza for 14 years. For most of that time the Israelis would not allow him to visit his family and friends in the West Bank. So, in spite of failing health, he soldiered on through the devastating siege and the murderous blitzkrieg.

I was privileged to meet him a couple of years ago and I just love the way this man speaks out. He doesn't mince words. He tells it the way it is, with truth and style. Retirement hasn’t silenced him or dimmed his perceptions.

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Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

This is a main question that every one asks. Does America want peace in Afghanistan? However, the following data can help us reach a rational conclusion: At the beginning of 2009, American had 30,000 troops in Afghanistan which they increased to 68,000 soldiers until the end of the year. This shows 110 percent boost of military man power. In December 2009, US president Obama announced 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan, showing further 30% increase. In January this year in London Conference on Afghanistan, US supported Hamid Karzai program of reintegration and reconciliation with Taliban i.e. the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Two weeks later, on 13 February, Pentagon launched a massive military operation against Marjah Township in Nad Ali district, Helmand province, violating their commitment to work for peace in the country. Now they are talking of taking the offensive to Kandahar.

So far, America has built 700 bases in the country, the major of them being in Kandahar and Bagram. They allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year for construction of more bases in Afghanistan. In view of these facts, no one can say America wants peace in Afghanistan. They have hidden and long-term colonialist objectives, not only in Afghanistan but in the whole region. By using Afghanistan as outpost, Washington wants to follows its policy of expansionism, regime change and disintegration in the neighboring countries.

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Bill Van Auken

"[Obama] repeated virtually word-for-word the lying justifications given by his predecessor for the US war. [He] stressed that the US occupation in Afghanistan will continue indefinitely."

Sneaking in and out of Kabul under the cover of darkness Sunday, President Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan only underscored the crisis confronting the US in the midst of the war’s current escalation.

Like similar trips to US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan staged by former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Obama’s flight to Kabul was organized under conditions of extraordinary secrecy, with even Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, ostensibly the country’s sovereign ruler, kept in the dark about the visit until the last possible moment.

Reporters brought aboard the plane were not told where they were going until it had taken off and had their cell phones confiscated. Before taking off, Air Force One was boarded inside a closed hangar to prevent unauthorized US military personnel from learning of the President’s departure.

Once in Afghanistan, Obama’s six-hour visit—less than half the time it took him to fly there—was restricted to the heavily fortified US Bagram Air Base and the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, where he was flown by helicopter.

Underlying these precautions is the reality that after eight and a half years of war, neither the Karzai regime nor the 120,000 US-led occupation troops can guarantee security anywhere in the country, including its capital.

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Dahr Jamail

Last August, Travis Bishop refused to serve in Afghanistan. Having filed for Conscientious Objector (CO) status, Bishop, based at Fort Hood, Texas, in the US Army’s 57th Expeditionary Signal Battalion, was court-martialed and sentenced to 12 months in a military brig. He was released from the brig today.

Bishop served his time in Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Lewis, Washington. This military brig is notorious for being a particularly difficult jail to serve time.

While in the brig, Bishop was recognized by Amnesty International and received support from hundreds of people from around the world who wrote letters of encouragement to him and wrote letters to Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the commanding general of Fort Hood, asking for Travis to be released from prison.

During his court-martial at Fort Hood last August, Bishop was tried by the military for his stand against an occupation he believes is “illegal.” He insisted that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he opposed on both moral and legal grounds, thus his decision to file for CO status. A CO is someone who refuses to participate in combat based on religious or ethical grounds, and can be given an honorable discharge by the military.

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Rethink Afghanistan

Q: Why would U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan go out of their way to smear a journalist?

A: Because he told the truth about a night raid that killed Afghan civilians, including pregnant women.

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Justin Raimondo

"His strongest virtue is that he’s a thug" says neocon (and ex-CIA analyst) Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Obama’s CIA apparently agrees.

The perpetual reinvention of reality proceeds apace, as neocons who once gave expression to the Bush administration’s most extreme rhetoric now pose as "moderates," – and these same neocons insist the Iraq war was a great success after all. They point to the recent Iraqi elections as proof of their redemption – even as their former pet, Ahmed Chalabi, rises from the political graveyard to become Iran’s chief spokesman and agent. It’s one of the richest, and perhaps most revealing, of the many ironies generated by the invasion of Iraq that the Che Guevara of the neocons has morphed into the handmaiden of the mullahs.

As tempting as it might be to elaborate on this theme, it would be a diversion from what is really the main news coming out of the election, and that is the political reincarnation of Iyad "the Executioner" Allawi. A former top Ba’athist official who fled in the early seventies, he didn’t resign from the party until 1975. He claims to have quit due to the increasing dominance of Saddam Hussein, but Hussein didn’t take complete power until President Al-Bakr resigned in 1979.

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Robert Freeman

Today, March 29th, marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of America's withdrawal from Vietnam. You won't hear it celebrated in any mainstream media, though it should be. Or more precisely, it should be mourned. Vietnam is the first war America ever lost.

It should be remembered so that we might learn the lessons of that loss. They are many, they are profound, and they could inform so many of our policy decisions today: that withdrawal from immoral wars doesn't mean the end of civilization as we know it; that even America's seemingly limitless resources are, in fact, limited; that masses of engaged, moral individuals can constrain the reckless, destructive folly of renegade elites.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Vietnam is that policies based on lies will ultimately fail, for in an open society it is the consent of the governed that is required to sustain major policy initiatives. A government can either earn that consent, or it must forfeit the essence of its democracy. If lying becomes its essential modus operandi, a nation ceases to be a democracy. Rather, it becomes a criminal conspiracy of self-interested insiders donning the trappings of democracy in order to gull the credulous.

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Stephen Lendman

[Photo: A young Haitian girl waits for supplies after the devastating earthquake Jan. 12. -Already vulnerable Haitian women and girls who survived the devastating earthquake are being harassed and raped in the makeshift camps that have sprung up all over the capital of Port-Au-Prince - possibly by some of the prisoners who escaped the National Penitentiary after it collapsed.]

Two and half months post-quake, the major media mostly ignore Haiti, the calamitous conditions on the ground, and the growing desperation of millions forced to largely endure on their own - out of sight, mind, the concern of world leaders, and UN, USAID and other aid organizations diverting most of the $700 million + donated to contractors and profiteering NGOs.

A March 11 New York Times editorial titled, "Haiti, Two Months Later," tried to have it both ways, citing relief effort failures, yet praising the US, UN, foreign countries, and aid organizations for:

"dispatch(ing) tents, tarps, food, water, medicine and doctors as they should. They have done a lot of good, particularly the United States, which rushed supplies, a troop force....and a hospital ship. Many lives were saved."

Unmentioned was the thousands of US combat troops obstructing aid, getting none to the most impoverished neighborhoods, and amounts to emergency shelters have been woefully inadequate, making calamitous conditions worse.

A March 25 Times editorial titled, "Haiti's Misery," in fact, admitted it, stating:

"The emergency in Haiti isn't over. It's getting worse, as the outside world's attention fades away....(Yet) Misery rages like a fever in the hundreds of camps sheltering hundreds of thousands of....people left homeless....The dreaded rains have swamped tents and ragged stick-and-tarp huts. They have turned walkways into mud lakes (exacerbating the problem of) cooking food, washing clothes, staying clean and avoiding disease."

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John O’Sullivan

Recently, I’ve been reading up on “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” a highly-regarded history of popular folly by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. His work can teach us a timely lesson in the current global warming controversy.

MacKay warns us of the pitfalls of group think using many notable historical examples when people,

“fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

The wise Scot goes on to cite many notable examples but one case struck me as I remembered it from my school days from the not so merry England of the 18th century. A total of 462 members of the House of Commons and 112 Peers signed up to the South Sea Company that persuaded vast swathes of the general public to also get sucked into one of the greatest financial scandals in history, the “South Sea Bubble“.

Even King George I and two of his mistresses, the Countess of Darlington and the Duchess of Kendal,got taken in and lost a fortune while countless citizens went bankrupt in the ill-founded venture. Thus we see how the “great and the good” can unwittingly lead us all into disaster.

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Dahr Jamail

Plain Speak

The 2008 National Defense Strategy reads:

US interests include protecting the nation and our allies from attack or coercion, promoting international security to reduce conflict and foster economic growth, and securing the global commons and with them access to world markets and resources. To pursue these interests, the US has developed military capabilities and alliances and coalitions, participated in and supported international security and economic institutions, used diplomacy and soft power to shape the behavior of individual states and the international system, and using force when necessary. These tools help inform the strategic framework with which the United States plans for the future, and help us achieve our ends.

It adds:

… Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the US. To accomplish this, the US will require bases and stations within and beyond western Europe and Northeast Asia.

In light of such clear objectives, it is highly unlikely that the US government will allow a truly sovereign Iraq, unfettered by US troops either within its borders or monitoring it from abroad, anytime soon.

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Russell Means

Map showing the Republic of Lakotah, as dictated by the 1858 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Statement by Russell Means, Republic of Lakotah
on the Occasion of the United States State Department “Listening Session” in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 16 March 2010

Once again, the occupation government of the United States of America has trotted out its dogs and ponies to provide a smokescreen and diversion from its continuing crimes against the indigenous peoples and nations of the Western Hemisphere. The reason for today’s media spectacle is supposedly for the US State Department to “listen” to input from indigenous peoples and nations for inclusion in the U.S.’s report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, universal periodic review process.

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Stephen Pizzo

After six and half decades on this planet I’ve come to some conclusions. One of them is that roughly 15% to 20% of Americans are genuinely, provably and incurably, stupid. And, while beauty may only be skin deep, stupid goes all the way to the bone. After a decade of failed governance -- two unnecessary wars and a ruined economy, Republicans had all but run out of enough moderately-sane voters willing to take any further chances with them. That’s when they glommed onto the idea of corralling America’s moron-demographic to plug the gap.

But the ignorant are hard to sway with fact-based policy discussions or green-eyeshade budget details. They need to be “energized” with drama, and plenty of it. Maury Povich and Jerry Springer knew that and built their fame and fortunes on knowing how to “energize” the dumb and dumber among us. It’s all about the drama baby... tabloid quality drama is what gets their blood boiling. Allegations, the wilder the better, and the fewer contradicting facts the better.

For example, you don’t use benign terms like, “End of life counseling” with the moron-demographic. (Too many of them might just stare back blankly and ask, “Ah, why would you want to counsel a dead person?”) Maury would advise, "Death panels,” instead. Death is, of course, the “end of life,”and we’re all going there someday, and as we approach that point of departure I’m sure we and/or our loved ones might appreciate and benefit from some counseling -- including morons. But by calling them “Death panels,” counseling becomes even scarier than death itself. That’s how one gets the moron-blood a-boilin.'

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Iowa State University

ISU study proves conclusively that violent video game play makes more aggressive kids

Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson has made much of his life’s work studying how violent video game play affects youth behavior. And he says a new study he led, analyzing 130 research reports on more than 130 000 subjects worldwide, proves conclusively that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids – regardless of their age, sex or culture.

The study was published in the March 2010 issue of the Psychological Bulletin, an American Psychological Association journal. It reports that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive thoughts and behavior, and decreased empathy and prosocial behavior in youths.

“We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method – that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal - and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects,” said Anderson, who is also director of Iowa State‘s Center for the Study of Violence. “And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.”

The study was conducted by a team of eight researchers, including ISU psychology graduate students Edward Swing and Muniba Saleem; and Brad Bushman, a former Iowa State psychology professor who now is on the faculty at the University of Michigan. Also on the team were the top video game researchers from Japan – Akiko Shibuya from Keio University and Nobuko Ihori from Ochanomizu University – and Hannah Rothstein, a noted scholar on meta-analytic review from the City University of New York.

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