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by Binoy Kampmark / January 23rd, 2018
It seemed so much busier, much more manic and crowded than the one year that had passed. Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump continues to excite the same headlines and explosions that began even before he made it to the White House.
By the time he got there, there were protests galore at agendas yet to be implemented, decrees yet to form. There were women’s marches, contradictory in their message (former flower power advocates joining hands with traditional military alliances, greying peaceniks wishing for a stable man, or woman, behind the nuclear option) while the President had yet to implement a …
by Ali Mohsin / January 23rd, 2018
The murder of a Pashtun man in Karachi by the Sindh police last week has brought renewed attention to the brutal practices of Pakistan’s police and security forces.
According to his relatives, Naqeebullah Mehsud, a 27-year-old from the war-torn region of South Waziristan, was kidnapped by plainclothes police officers in Karachi earlier this month. On January 16, Mehsud’s family was told that he’d been killed in a shootout with police along with 4 other alleged terrorists a few days earlier. Mehsud was buried in his hometown of Makin in South Waziristan on Friday. On the same day, a large demonstration in …
by Jonathan Cook / January 23rd, 2018
Barely a day passes without a new development in the war on social media – that is, the war on us. Today, it is a report that Twitter has emailed hundreds of thousands of its users, warning them that they shared “Russian propaganda”.
As WSWS notes:
Twitter is warning its users that it knows exactly what they are viewing and sharing on social media, implying that if they post something that falls afoul of the US government, they may be subject to investigation or prosecution.
And, we should add, they will almost certainly be subject to online “disappearance” – the …
Round Ups, Checkpoints and National ID Cards
by John W. Whitehead / January 23rd, 2018
The roundups are getting worse. The checkpoints are getting worse. The harassment is getting worse. The things we were worried would happen are happening.
— Angus Johnston, professor at the City University of New York
No one is safe.
No one is immune.
No one gets spared the anguish, fear and heartache of living under the shadow of an authoritarian police state.
That’s the message being broadcast 24/7 to the citizens and residents of the American police state with every new piece of government propaganda, every new law that criminalizes otherwise lawful activity, every new policeman on the beat, every new surveillance camera casting …
by Edward Curtin / January 23rd, 2018
There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Any artist [person] who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist [person] in him.
– Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”
It ain’t me you’re lookin for, babe.
– Bob Dylan, “It Ain’t Me, Babe:, Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964
Enter
The set was real but illusionary: A legendary old New England hotel …
by Jason Holland / January 22nd, 2018
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
— Not Mark Twain
Prevaricator: a person who speaks so as to avoid the precise truth; quibbler; equivocator.
Tersely; a skillful liar.
Most all lying has conscious and subconscious elements. When a lie dribbles out of your mouth a little ding goes off in the brain that you might not even be able to articulate, but it informs you that what you just said perhaps was not entirely true, or could be a best guess expressed as if it were fact. The half-truth irritatingly gnaws away back there. …
by Mathew Maavak / January 22nd, 2018
The ongoing India-US rapprochement has been couched in terms of a pact between the “two largest democracies in the world” and similar superlatives. While geographically-challenged Americans may be forgiven for not recognizing their immediate northern neighbour as both a larger nation and a better democracy, mnemonically-challenged Indian pundits should nonetheless subject India-US ties to trend-based reality checks.
Three recent notable sticking points below should deflate India’s pro-American media.
Why does the US continue to withhold David Headley aka Daood Syed Gilani – a key planner behind the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks—from the Indian justice system? Headley, long fingered as …
by Jonathan Cook / January 21st, 2018
More than 10 years ago Israel tightened its grip on Gaza, enforcing a blockade on goods coming in and out of the tiny coastal enclave that left much of the two million-strong population there unemployed, impoverished and hopeless.
Since then, Israel has launched three separate major military assaults that have destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, killed many thousands and left tens of thousands more homeless and traumatised.
Gaza is effectively an open-air prison, an extremely overcrowded one, with only a few hours of electricity a day and its ground water polluted by seawater and sewage.
Last week Israeli military officials for the first time echoed …
Charter School Supporters Versus Public School Supporters
by Shawgi Tell / January 21st, 2018
As evidence against charter schools increases, charter school supporters have started to assert more frequently that charter schools are not a panacea, they cannot fix everything. And even though they have many problems, they should always be supported nonetheless. Charter schools are said to be a “viable option” for some and people should have “choices.”
After all, at the end of the day, “we” are all supposedly working for the same thing, “we” all want what is best “for the kids.” That is what is important according to charter school advocates, not all the serious problems plaguing charter schools and the …
by Jonathan Cook / January 20th, 2018
This report on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s visit to a UK school to promote the company’s new coding curriculum for schoolchildren could hardly be a better illustration of the way the Guardian newspaper serves as a key propagandist for aggressive global corporate capitalism, helping to create for it a façade of humanitarianism.
The Guardian presents Cook (no relation) as a concerned global citizen, a gay man who fights for LGBT rights and might have been Hillary Clinton’s running mate if things had turned out differently. The article could just as easily have been a press release straight out …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 20th, 2018
The more overtures, sudden but entirely appropriate, being made by North Korea to their South Korean counterparts, the more concern seems to emanate from quarters in Washington and Tokyo. A recurring streak in these engagements is the fear that Pyongyang is simply prevaricating, distracting and diverting: they are having us all for fools.
This betrays the whole premise of how US policy, and to a good degree that of Japan, has been linked to an obsession to place nuclear weapons dismantling and removal as a first step of talks rather than a final outcome with an enduring peace settlement.
Such a …
An interview with Law Professor Angela A. Allen-Bell
by Angola 3 News / January 20th, 2018
John Clutchette
On January 12, 2018, the California Board of Parole Hearings granted parole to an elderly inmate named John Clutchette. However, supporters of parole for Clutchette are concerned that California Governor Jerry Brown will reverse the Board’s decision, and Clutchette will not be released.
Supporters have a reason to be concerned. After all, this is exactly what happened in 2016 when Clutchette was similarly granted parole by the Board but Governor Brown chose to reverse the Board’s ruling.
Legal scholar Angela A. Allen-Bell, a professor at Southern University …
by Ken Hannaford-Ricardo / January 20th, 2018
I spent much of yesterday with some kids the world forgot. Young, remarkably sturdy and resilient, they can often be naïve and almost willfully gullible. They inhabit a world that delights in tripping them up and watching them fall. They are Kabul’s Street Kids.
Every Friday morning, roughly 100 of these forgotten children sit in noisy – sometimes raucous – groups of seven to ten in a large, unheated classroom, discussing and brainstorming human rights – rights few in the international community seem to acknowledge they enjoy. On this thirty degree Kabul morning, some are in shirtsleeves; few have coats adequate …
by Robert Hunziker / January 19th, 2018
It was July 1st, 1952 when Look magazine carried this story: “Flying Saucers— The Hunt Goes On” with the byline: “Fearful of danger from the skies, the United States Air Force is launching a secret search to discover once-and-for-all what is the mysterious, unbelievable thing Americans keep sighting overhead.”
At the time, the Air Force confirmed more than 800 sightings of flying saucers with reports from outposts all across the country, including “our vital atomic installation sites.” Atomic sites were specific areas of intense interests for the odd fast-moving saucers.
Flash forward 65 years: Interviews with U.S. military personnel validate the presence …
by Andre Vltchek / January 19th, 2018
Here it goes again! Several countries of Oceania (also known as South Pacific Nations), or however you want to call that vast, beautiful but thoroughly devastated part of the world, have voted “for Israel”, “for the United States’ proposed resolution at the United Nations”, and therefore, “against Palestine”.
As reported on December 22, 2017 by Al Jazeera:
The United Nations General Assembly has voted by a huge majority to declare a unilateral US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “null and void”.
At an emergency session of the General Assembly on Thursday, 128 countries voted in favour of a resolution rejecting US President Donald Trump’s …
"New Look" Guardian, Old-Style Orthodoxy
by Media Lens / January 18th, 2018
As Noam Chomsky has often remarked: ‘liberal bias is extremely important in a sophisticated system of propaganda.’ One major news outlet that Chomsky had in mind was the New York Times, but the same applies in the UK. As a senior British intelligence official noted of the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan:
It is always helpful for governments who want to get the Guardian readers of the world on board to have a humanitarian logic.
This suggests that respected liberal media like the New York Times and Guardian are key battlegrounds in the relentless elite efforts to control public opinion.
On …
by Peter Koenig / January 18th, 2018
The false alarm on a ballistic missile attack on Hawaii last Saturday from North Korea did not help the Peace Talks which were essentially initiated by DPRK’s President, Kim Jong-un. They spread enormous fear of a nuclear annihilation of Honolulu, pulverization of homes and people – of Armageddon for the Hawaiian population. Was this a Trump attempt to boycott the talks? Or was it the war-mongering faction of the deep state wanting more threats of war, scaring the Hawaiian population into believing that this might become reality; pushing them with a false alarm into wanting the devastation once and for …
Interview with Mark Mason
by Seema Mustafa / January 18th, 2018
Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani and US President Donald Trump
New Delhi/San Francisco – Editor’s Note: US Domestic and Foreign Policy Analyst Mark Mason speaks to The Citizen on the current Trump administration and its world view, with specific focus on West (Iran) and South (India,Pakistan) Asia. Mark Mason offers analyses of United States domestic and foreign policies for the international news media. He was trained as a biological anthropologist educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and recently engaged in the Occupy and bioregional green …
by Peter Biesterfeld / January 18th, 2018
Growing up in India during the war, Shiv Chopra was shaped by two of Mahatma Gandhi’s guiding principles: “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt,” and “the first step in fighting injustice is to make it visible.”
On January 7, the former Health Canada scientist and whistle-blower who believed “we should take food out of the economic equation” quietly succumbed to cancer in a Kanata hospice, surrounded by family. Online tributes continue to pour in from all over the world in response to the …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 18th, 2018
Few documentaries have had quite this impact, so much so that it has ushered in the unfortunate combination of war and plastic, two terms that sit uneasily together, if at all. Tears were recorded; anxiety levels were propelled as Sir David Attenborough tore and tugged at heart strings in his production Blue Planet II. The oceans, warned the documentary maker, are becoming a toxic repository, and humans are to blame.
More than eight million tons of plastic eventually finds an oceanic destination. Decomposition will take centuries. For Attenborough, one scene from the series stood out.
In it, as snowflakes settle …
by Cindy Sheehan and Rick Sterling / January 18th, 2018
There is one thing missing from the upcoming Women’s March publicity and philosophy: the urgent need for Peace not War!
The March will speak out against hate, discrimination and exploitation. That’s good.
The March will also speak out strongly in favor of equality, women’s reproductive choice and respect for all people regardless to disability, gender, orientation, etc.. That’s also good.
But the subject of US military aggression and war is essential. We hope that many marchers will include this in their signage and discussions. Despite many antiwar groups and individuals actively advocating for “peace” to be in the platform/demands of the March, …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / January 17th, 2018
The United States cannot be a moral or ethical country until it faces up to the realities of US empire and the destruction it causes around the world. The US undermines governments (including democracies), kills millions of people, causes mass migrations of people fleeing their homes, communities and countries and produces vast environmental damage.
A new coalition, The Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases, held its inaugural event January 12-14, 2018 at the University of Baltimore in Maryland. The meeting was framed by a Unity Statement that brought together numerous peace and justice organizations. The basis for unity was:
U.S. foreign …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / January 17th, 2018
Perhaps few double standards in international relations could be so sharply exposed as the US-Canada hosted Conference in Vancouver on 16th January, focused on the traded threats between the United States and North Korea.
The US possesses an estimated 9,600 nuclear missiles, enough to eliminate life on earth multiple times – were it not vapourised in a mere “few” nuclear strikes.
Donald Trump has threatened North Korea with “fire and fury”, suggesting that it may be necessary to “totally destroy” the small nation. It has been widely reported that the US has a “decapitation programme” to eliminate the North Korean Leader and …
by Brett Redmayne-Titley / January 17th, 2018
A Leader should be like a father… he helps the country grow, teaches it, provides for its future. Erdogan? He is no father to Turkey.
— Turkish citizen on the streets of Istanbul
Author’s Note: This is Part One of an on-scene investigative series direct from the streets of Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria.
On the streets, cafes, and carpet shops of Istanbul a very different story than the one presented by western media is developing about the true allegiance of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While he continues to play a dangerous international game between Russia and the NATO/Israeli/US alliance his biggest future enemy …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 17th, 2018
Not a day passes without a prominent Israeli politician or intellectual making an outrageous statement against Palestinians. Many of these statements tend to garner little attention or evoke rightly deserved outrage.
Just recently, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, Uri Ariel, called for more death and injuries on Palestinians in Gaza.
“What is this special weapon we have that we fire and see pillars of smoke and fire, but nobody gets hurt? It is time for there to be injuries and deaths as well,” he said.
Ariel’s calling for the killing of more Palestinians came on the heels of other repugnant statements …
Offering to talk while threatening military force hasn't worked in 30 years.
by Gareth Porter / January 16th, 2018
A North Korean soldier looks in through the window of the T2 building as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates tour the Demilitarized Zone in Korea on July 21, 2010.(U.S. Department of Defense photo.)
With his recent “my (nuclear) button is bigger than yours” taunt, Donald Trump’s rhetoric has fully descended into school yard braggadocio, with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as a convenient foil. But his administration’s overwhelming reliance on military and economic pressure rather than on negotiations to influence North Korea’s …
by John W. Whitehead / January 16th, 2018
We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to …
by Robert J. Burrowes / January 16th, 2018
A long-standing French protectorate briefly occupied by Japan during World War II, Cambodia became independent in 1953 as the French finally withdrew from Indochina. Under the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia remained officially neutral, including during the subsequent US war on Indochina. However, by the mid-1960s, parts of the eastern provinces of Cambodia were bases for North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front (NVA/NLF) forces operating against South Vietnam and this resulted in nearly a decade of bombing by the United States from 4 October 1965.
In 1970 Sihanouk was ousted in a US-supported coup led by General …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 16th, 2018
Britain is ill, and even as the opportunists and populists scramble before the hardened negotiators of the European Union over imminent exit, revising optimistic forecasts and notions of sovereign greatness has begun. Within Theresa May’s decaying state comes yet another economic disaster, and one that has prompted a revival of government assistance before the vicissitudes of the market. This, from a Tory government extolling the divine nature of free market enterprise.
Carillion, the UK’s second biggest construction company, is in a mammoth pickle, one to the tune of £1.5 billion. It has gone into liquidation after the weekend failure to reach …
by Mostafa Afzalzadeh / January 15th, 2018
Mostafa Afzalzadeh: Why do you think the western countries are trying to use people against Iran and not use military force? What is the difference?
Andre Vltchek: It is because Iran is ‘not alone’. If the West were to dare use military force against Iran, directly, there would be an immediate response from many countries on Earth. I believe that Iran’s allies, like Russia, several Latin American countries, but also most likely China, would not sit idle. I am not saying that they would immediately send their armies and begin fighting the U.S. and European forces, but I am certain that …
