Latest articles
by Jonathan Cook / April 30th, 2017
The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is due to meet Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday to discuss reviving the long-cold corpse of the peace process.
Back home, things are heating up. There is anger in the West Bank, both on the streets and within the ranks of Abbas’s Fatah movement. The trigger is a two-week-old hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners.
Last Thursday, Palestinians shuttered their businesses in a show of solidarity, and the next day youths clashed with the Israeli army in a “day of rage”.
About a quarter of the 6,500 political prisoners held by Israel – almost all …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 8
by Douglas Valentine / April 30th, 2017
https://youtu.be/FtAVy7P1uJg
Nhu?n’s dismay with Thi?u climaxed during the national elections of 1971, when Thi?u resorted to the same dirty tricks K? tried to use in 1967. Thi?u, however, was so successful in rigging the presidential election that the other candidates withdrew in protest. Thi?u ran unopposed and was elected, but his power grab dealt a fatal blow to South Vietnam’s nascent democracy and helped revive the insurgency. But Thi?u was unrepentant; the North was planning a spring offensive and his only concern was security; so he imposed further restrictions on the independent media and political parties.
After the election, Thieu appointed CIO …
Part 1 of 2
by Leftist Critic / April 29th, 2017
It was a deary day in Washington, D.C. The rain was pouring down and thousands of people were gathered in a huddled mass, listening to speakers tell about their scientific work or scientific innovations. Others uttered platitudes or nationalistic sayings, declaring the US should be “number one” in science above the rest of the world. This was the March for Science in D.C. this past Earth Day, one of the many actions across the world. The march and rally beforehand, like many of the other marches for environmentalism through the Obama years, likely will have no effect on …
by Yves Engler / April 29th, 2017
A registered “charity” with buckets of donations from arms manufacturers and other corporate sources is aggressively trying to push Canadian foreign policy further towards militarism and the use of violence.
And the right wing Canadian Global Affairs Institute seems to be growing in influence, or at least media prominence.
Since last month’s federal budget senior CGAI analyst David Perry has been quoted throughout the media arguing for increased military spending. “I’m stunned this budget is actually taking money away from the military and pretending to give it back several decades in the future,” Perry told CBC.
In its reports, conferences and commentary the …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 7
by Douglas Valentine / April 29th, 2017
Ever the idealist, Lê Xuân Nhu?n refused to participate in Nguy?n Cao K?’s plot to seize power from his running mate Nguy?n V?n Thi?u. Instead, he informed the CIA, which took steps to assure that Thi?u would become the first president of the Second Republic of South Vietnam.
But Thi?u could not assert his power until he had dismantled the security apparatus K?, as prime minister, had developed since 1965. And given that K?’s apparatus was effectively providing security for Sài Gòn during the 1968 Tet uprising, Thi?u’s dismantling process took several months.
The critical moment occurred in early May 1968, during …
by Stuart Littlewood / April 29th, 2017
In the UK you can start a petition on the Government website. If it reaches 10,000 signatures you get a response from the Government. If it tops 100,000 it will be considered for debate in Parliament.
Currently there’s a petition saying the UK must apologise for the Balfour Declaration and lead peace efforts in Palestine. “We call on Her Majesty’s Government to openly apologise to the Palestinian people for issuing the Balfour Declaration. The colonial policy of Britain between 1917-1948 led to mass displacement of the Palestinian nation. HMG should recognise its role during the Mandate and now must lead …
by Sandi Dollinger / April 28th, 2017
Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistance is not an easy train read. It is, however, a “Must Read” and very compelling.
In a culture where war is taken for granted, whether it be on a foreign battleground or in a domestic arena, the Lynds offer their book as a plea for Peace. Peace through nonviolent actions. Peace through voices speaking individually or in community.
Divided into two parts, “In the Military” and “Behind Bars”, this new work provides a compassionate, yet comprehensive perspective …
by Elizabeth West / April 28th, 2017
For many of us, it is insanely difficult to wrap our hearts and minds around the prospects which lie ahead for humanity. The list of potential calamities is long and varied, and the scenarios that rise to the top of the ‘most probable today’ column shift all the time. Are we looking at full-blown nuclear war, or will it ‘just’ be Fukushima cesium making its way into our food and water? Could it be rising acidified oceans, unpredictable weather fueled by hotter seas, or maybe a methane ‘burp’ that leads to an abrupt end to agriculture? And then, even if …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 6
by Douglas Valentine / April 28th, 2017
“In 1967,” Nhuan said, “the Central Vietnam Southern Lowland Region comprised five provinces: Bình-??nh, Phú-Yên, Khánh-Hòa, Ninh-Thu?n, Bình-Thu?n, and one independent city, Cam-Ranh. That region was merged with mine to become the II-CTZ (Corps Tactical Zone). I was made Chief of Special Branch for those twelve Provinces and two cities. The territory was about half that of the whole South Vietnam. The coastal city of Nha Trang fell within my jurisdiction and the PIC in Nha Trang City doubled as the Special Branch office in Khánh Hòa Province.”
“At that time, the military wanted to control the National Police. II-Corps Commander …
by Andre Vltchek / April 27th, 2017
Dr. Gus Abu-Sitta
Dr. Gus Abu-Sitta is the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon. He specializes in: reconstructive surgery. What it means in this part of the world is clear: they bring you people from the war zones, torn to pieces, missing faces, burned beyond recognition, and you have to try to give them their life back.
Dr. Abu-Sitta is also a thinker. A Palestinian born in Kuwait, he studied and lived in the UK, and worked in various war zones of the …
by David Penner / April 27th, 2017
American health care is in a truly deplorable state. Along with virtually everything else in our collapsing society, the American people are increasingly held captive to the barbaric whims and dictates of a ruling establishment, which holds nothing sacred, and which has acquired unprecedented amounts of wealth and power. Consequently, it was inevitable that in our health care system, the patient would become a mere commodity, to be used solely for purposes of research and profit maximization.
In any discussion regarding the current state of health care in America, it is illustrative to use as benchmarks, two of the most prestigious …
by Kathy Kelly / April 27th, 2017
On April 26th, 2017, in Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah, the Saudi-led coalition which has been waging war in Yemen for the past two years dropped leaflets informing Hodeidah’s residents of an impending attack. One leaflet read:
Our forces of legitimacy are heading to liberate Hodeidah and end the suffering of our gracious Yemeni people. Join your legitimate government in favor of the free and happy Yemen.
And another:
The control of the Hodeidah port by the terrorist Houthi militia will increase famine and hinder the delivery of international relief aid to our gracious Yemeni people.
Certainly the leaflets represent one aspect of a …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 5
by Douglas Valentine / April 27th, 2017
Nhu?n left the CIO/SOC in December 1963 to become Chief of the National Police in Qu?ng-??c Province, headquartered in Gia Nghia City in the Central Highlands. Like his previous post in Darlac, Qu?ng-??c was a mountainous province on the Kampuchea border, populated by Montagnards.
Nhu?n maintained his CIO contacts, but there was less contact between the SOC and the Special Branch in the years after the 1963 revolution, as the CIA tightened its control of the CIO at the expense of the Special Police.
As a province police chief, Nhu?n was now a manager. His office consisted of three bureaus: the Special …
by Yves Engler / April 27th, 2017
On Tuesday thousands will gather to celebrate the most aggressive ongoing European settler colonialism. Organizers of Montréal’s annual Israel Day rally claim it is the largest event of its kind in the country.
A significant proportion of the crowd will come from the city’s 15 Jewish day schools, which receive most of their funds from the public purse. Many of the kids bused downtown will carry Israeli flags and their faces will be painted in its colours. At the 2014 Israel Day rally a 12-year-old Herzliah student, Jon Frajman, told the Montréal Gazette, “if we didn’t support Israel, …
by William Hawes / April 26th, 2017
Check out the real situation/Nation war against nation/
Where did it all begin?/When will it end?
— Bob Marley, “Real Situation”, from the album Uprising
Where is the outrage regarding the Trump administration’s bellicose attitude towards North Korea? The past two weeks have been a blur of outright savagery towards other nations, with cruise missiles raining down on Syrians and one giant bomb on an ISIS “cave complex” in Afghanistan. Now, the Donald has promised to send his “armada” towards the Sea of Japan, after it was found heading in the opposite direction a couple weeks ago.
This shifting of belligerent, callous violence and threats around …
by Ralph Nader / April 26th, 2017
The Lawless-loving corporatists have worked overtime to besmirch the word “regulation” (or law and order for corporations) and edify the word “deregulation,” to help bring about their dream state of dismantled or weakened regulation.
Here is one little-mentioned ongoing disaster of non-regulation costing our country. The patsy FAA, for decades after the hijacking of planes to Castro’s Cuba, refused to require the airlines to install toughened cockpit doors and stronger locks to prevent entry by terrorists bent on making the aircraft a destructive weapon. Why? Because the airlines objected to the mere $3000 cost per aircraft and, by its very nature, …
by Paul Craig Roberts / April 26th, 2017
When the gullible and insouciant American public and the presstitutes who participate in the deceptions permitted the Deep State to get away with the fairy tale that a few Saudi Arabians under the direction of Osama bin Laden, but without the support of any government or intelligence agency, were able to outwit the entirety of the Western Alliance and Israel’s Mossad and deliver the greatest humiliation in history to “the world’s only superpower” by making the entirety of the US government dysfunctional on September 11, 2001, Washington learned that it could get away with anything, any illegal and treasonous act, …
Who Let the Saudi Fox in the Hen House?
by Medea Benjamin / April 26th, 2017
It’s hard to sink to a greater depth of hypocrisy than voting Saudi Arabia onto a UN Commission charged with promoting women’s equality and empowerment. And yet, on April 23rd, that is precisely what the UN Economic and Social Council did. Of the 54 countries on the Council, 47 of them agreed to add Saudi Arabia to a four-year term on the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
How did the US Ambassador to the UN and the democratic champions of Europe vote? The ballot was secret, and is it any wonder that the UN representatives refuse to reveal their …
by Ramzy Baroud / April 26th, 2017
Israel has resorted to three main strategies to suppress Palestinian calls for justice and human rights, including the Right of Return for refugees.
One is dedicated to rewriting history; another attempts to distract from present realities altogether and a third aims at reclaiming the Palestinian narrative as essentially an Israeli one.
The rewriting of history happened much earlier than some historians would assume. The Israeli hasbara machine went into motion almost simultaneously with Plan Dalet (Plan D), which saw the military conquest of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants.
But the actual discourse regarding the ‘Nakba’ – or the ‘Catastrophe’ …
by Media Lens / April 26th, 2017
It is hard to believe that just three weeks ago the entire corporate media was in uproar over Syria; specifically, about the need to ‘do something’ in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Shaykhun, Idlib, Syria, on April 4. Guardian commentator George Monbiot summed up the corporate media zeitgeist:
Do those who still insist Syrian govt didn’t drop chemical weapons have any idea how much evidence they are denying?
Monbiot linked to evidence supplied by Bellingcat, an organisation hosted by Eliot Higgins. In a 2014 …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 4
by Douglas Valentine / April 26th, 2017
The dictatorial Ngô regime collapsed in 1963, for several reasons. One contributing factor was its Strategic Hamlet program. Designed to protect the regime by relocating millions of mostly rural people, the program was mistakenly placed under the supervision of Colonel Ph?m Ng?c Th?o. A Communist “sleeper” agent, Th?o built as many hamlets as fast as possible, knowing the resettled people would resent being torn from their ancestral lands and garrisoned in forts they were compelled to build. Th?o further subverted the program by having the hamlets built in communist strongholds, a move that provided the insurgents with easy access to …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 25th, 2017
The establishment got another burning in the French elections on Sunday, revealing again that there is no level of voter disgust that will not find some voice in the current range of elections. The terror for pollsters and the establishment now is whether Marine Le Pen will realise her anti-Euro project and drag the French nation kicking and moaning into a new, even more fractious order. In her way will be the pro-European Union figure of Emmanuel Macron.
The French example is similar to others of recent times: parties with presumed tenure were confined to a punitive dustbin, rubbished for stale, …
by Bill Quigley / April 25th, 2017
New Orleans is the nation’s largest and most complete experiment in charter schools. After Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiaana took control of public schools in New Orleans, and launched a nearly complete transformation of a public school system into a system of charter schools. Though there are spots of improvement in the New Orleans charter system, major problems remain.
Many of these problems were on display in New Orleans when the NAACP, which last year called for a moratorium on charter schools until issues of accountability and transparency were addressed, held a community forum in New …
Part 4: Readings in the Jewish Zionist Control of the United States: Interviews with Francis Boyle, James Petras, and Kim Petersen
by B.J. Sabri / April 25th, 2017
Previously I argued that the phony war on “islamic terrorism”, the incessant attacks on and indictment of Islam as a violent religion, and the claim to bring so-called “democracy” to a region ruled by “dictators” are ploys for U.S. wars in the Middle East. Real motives instead, I further argued, are driving these wars with the objective to destabilize, remake, or destroy Arab societies, partition all states that are not in line with the U.S. and Israeli policies, and, in short, dismantle the Arab world. Two agendas converge to implement this effort.
The first has for a focus the aims of …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 3
by Douglas Valentine / April 25th, 2017
By 1961, the insurgency was growing and the in-coming Kennedy Administration put the blame on the repressive policies of Ngô regime. The Kennedys were also upset that Di?m’s brothers C?n and Nhu, and their spymaster Tuy?n, were smuggling opium out of Laos and using the profits to finance a vast agent network targeted against Di?m’s political opponents. Having just endured the Bay of the Pigs fiasco, the Kennedys were angry at the CIA, which had trained many of the agents and commandoes Nhu, C?n, and Tuy?n used in their smuggling operations.
https://youtu.be/vSjTNpyJMUo
Compelled to correct the situation, the CIA created the proprietary …
by Nozomi Hayase / April 24th, 2017
US authorities are reported to have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This overreach of US government toward a publisher, whose principle is aligned with the U.S. Constitution, is another sign of a crumbling façade of democracy. The Justice Department in the Obama administration could not prosecute WikiLeaks for publishing documents pertaining to the US government, because they struggled to determine whether the First Amendment protection applied in this case. Now, the torch of Obama’s war on whistleblowers seems to …
The Life and Times of a South Vietnamese Special Police Officer, Part 2
by Douglas Valentine / April 24th, 2017
In modernizing the GVN’s police forces, MSUG sent qualified uniformed police officers to study at Michigan State for a year. Theoretically, these individuals became police chiefs upon their return to South Vietnam; in fact, any official who wanted to remain in the Ngô family’s good graces did not stray far from home.
As Nhu?n explained, officials were not promoted into positions of authority unless they met the four D criteria. All civil servants and military personnel had to join the first D: ?oàn Công-Ch?c Cách M?ng Qu?c Gia, the National Revolutionary Civil Servants Organization. The second D (??o) referred to the …
by Ricardo Vaz / April 24th, 2017
April 19 chavista march in support of the government in Caracas
The episodes in recent days, featuring the erection of barricades, destruction of public property and widespread violence by opposition groups bring back memories of the 2014 guarimbas. ((Guarimba is the name given to violent anti-government protests, usually involving street barricades.)) After months of violence, with certain neighbourhoods effectively under siege, and a death toll of 43, the opposition gangs slowly demobilised. But some analysts argue that this time it is different. With the right-wing coming …
by Yves Engler / April 24th, 2017
For more than a century Canadians have gone abroad to do “good” in poorer parts of the world. Whether they spurred positive change or simply became foreign agents should be of interest to international non-governmental organizations.
Last week the Globe and Mail reported on the Canadians Christians who set off to proselytize in China in 1891. Focused on their medical achievements, the laudatory story hinted at a darker side of their work. It quoted a missionary who was “critical of the lifestyle most of the missionaries led, with their large houses, many servants and imported comforts which contrasted with the …
by Graham Peebles / April 24th, 2017
It was the school holidays and there were lots of teenagers in my local park. I sometimes spot them meandering home, but I rarely see them en masse as it were. Blind to the bluebells, peacocks and glories of nature all around us, they were glued to their palm-sized screens. What were they so engrossed in – some kind of game or trivial video, a map of the park perhaps, unnecessary given the proliferation of signs? Are they texting, e-mailing, or trawling through the Internet, or all of the above? If one did not know what these shiny seductive objects …
