Latest articles
The Conscience of Chelsea Manning
by Nozomi Hayase / April 4th, 2014
Four years have passed since WikiLeaks’ sensational release of the classified US military video titled Collateral Murder. On April 5 2010, the raw footage was published depicting airstrikes by a US Army helicopter gunship in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. The soldiers attacked Iraqis, killing about a dozen men wandering down a street, including two Reuters staffers, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh in the first of three reckless attacks involving civilians. The video opened with a quote from George Orwell: “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of …
by William Boardman / April 4th, 2014
It was Valentine’s Day when the nation’s only radioactive nuclear waste facility first released radioactive particles including Plutonium and Americium into the atmosphere of New Mexico and beyond, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico. Earlier that same day, the New Mexico Environment Department opened the public comment period on an application to modify and expand that nuclear waste facility, which the department said it planned to allow.
The first thing the U.S. government and the government contractor running the supposedly secure radioactive waste project did immediately when faced with the first-time-ever …
by Paul Haeder / April 4th, 2014
With fits and starts, it’s been difficult penning this most recent perspective for Dissident Voice. So many cascading, rotting, and broken systems tumbling down and splaying any sort of agency in the US of Amnesiacs. It’s a daily scab being slowly ripped up. The entire media morass, even the so-called lefties, it’s a schizoid world, indeed.
Generals speaking about yet another shooter. Generals getting the microphone? Old people talking about “what do millennials think?” Do we care about Letterman the Rotting Millionaire Retiring (from what?), and what he does? Or Jon Leibowitz Stewart or Rachel Maddow? Do we care, and are …
by Uri Avnery / April 4th, 2014
There is nothing better than a scandal every week. A juicy scandal excites people, engages the media, takes our minds off matters like war and peace, occupation and apartheid. Like panem et circenses (bread and entertainment) in ancient Rome.
This week we had several scandals to occupy us. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, was convicted of taking huge bribes when he was the mayor of Jerusalem. He was paid for approving a monstrous building complex on the highest hill of West Jerusalem, visible from a great distance.
As if this was not enough, Sylvan Shalom, a cabinet minister with half a …
by Ben Norton / April 4th, 2014
Do you live in a capitalist society? Are you rich? For extra bonus points, are you a white man? Oh yeah, one last question, are you a rapist and/or a sexual predator of children? Well, as recent events have evinced, you essentially have complete impunity from the law, so don’t worry.
In an example of the US “Justice” System at its finest, it has just been announced that rapist and child predator (of his own children) Robert H. Richards IV, the millionaire great grandson of du Pont family patriarch and robber baron Irenee du Pont, will be returning home a free …
by Robert Hunziker / April 3rd, 2014
How many people wait with bated breath for Earth Day to arrive in April of each year? Who knows, but taking a wild guess, probably nobody. Earth Day kinda died out along with the fade-out of the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies. Today, they’re all grandparents and Earth Day has dissipated.
Earth Day was started to provide “support for environmental protection,” and as shall be described, Earth Day came onto the scene like the Big Bang, but ever since, it has been a fizzler, failing to impact, even slightly, the biggest environmental problem facing America, ever.
On April 22, 1970, Earth …
John Kiriakou and the Torture Report
by Cayman Kai / April 3rd, 2014
Although the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on Thursday to declassify a report detailing the CIA’s use of torture that will confirm the 2007 revelations from John Kiriakou, former CIA analyst and case officer, Kiriakou himself is still languishing in prison. Kiriakou still has at least another year left in prison, but as Americans confront the horror contained within the Torture Report, they ought to also call for justice and freedom for the brave whistleblower who warned us about it years ago.
On December 10, 2007 in an interview with ABC News, Kiriakou discussed his involvement in the capture and questioning of …
by Linh Dinh / April 3rd, 2014
I was in Columbus all of ten hours. Even downtown, some of the sidewalks were clogged by snow, and as I crossed the Sciotto into Franklinton, my trudging became even more laborious. Mostly I walked on the side of the street, and on side streets, right in the middle. From an attic window, a torn American flag hung, and on a garage, there was a crudely drawn handgun, accompanied by “BEWARE I WILL SHOOT.” I passed a house that was for sale for $15,000, cash, and saw portraits of Lincoln and Washington in the windows of Dr. …
by Alton C. Thompson / April 3rd, 2014
by Ramzy Baroud / April 3rd, 2014
As the US-imposed April 29 deadline for a “framework” agreement between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority looms, time is also running out for the American administration itself. The Obama administration must now conjure up an escape route to avoid a political crisis if the talks are to fail, as they surely will.
Chances are the Americans knew well that peace under the current circumstances is simply not attainable. The Israeli government’s coalition is so adamantly anti-Arab, anti-peace and anti any kind of agreement that would fall short from endorsing the Israeli apartheid-like occupation, predicated on colonial expansion, annexations of …
by David Swanson / April 3rd, 2014
Fifteen years ago, NATO was bombing Yugoslavia. This may be difficult for people to grasp who believe the Noah movie is historical fiction, but: What your government told you about the bombing of Kosovo was false. And it matters.
While Rwanda is the war that many misinformed people wish they could have had (or rather, wish others could have had for them), Yugoslavia is the war they’re glad happened — at least whenever World War II really fails as a model for the new war they’re after — in Syria for instance, or in Ukraine — the latter …
Oh, Really?
by Stuart Littlewood / April 3rd, 2014
What maddens Zionists most is that they cannot control civil society like they can pull the strings of the spineless political élite. They fear BDS action (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) will derail their project for a Greater Israel. So they now sneer at civil society and try to discourage further BDS efforts. This tactic comes across loud and clear in Michael Rosenberg’s article “The Goal Of The BDS Movement Is Dismantling Israel, Not The ’67 Occupation”.
Actually, Israel is well on the way to dismantling itself through its own vile and unsustainable behaviour. BDS is simply giving it a helping hand.
A quick …
The Norrie Case and the Australian High Court
by Binoy Kampmark / April 3rd, 2014
The High Court of Australia occasionally surprises, and while it lacks the political and social ballast of its peers in other countries – the US Supreme Court, for instance – it demonstrated on Wednesday how it can give certain policies a push. According to their honours on the bench, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1995 (NSW) permits the Registrar to designate a person’s sex as “non-specific”.
The Registrar was obviously stumbling in the dark over the process, having initially issued the applicant, Norrie May-Welby, a “not specified” status on her Change of Sex certificate and Change of Name certificate. …
by Alan Hart / April 3rd, 2014
In an article asserting that the BDS (Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions) Movement is “irrelevant”, M. J. Rosenberg has written, under the headline “The Goal Of The BDS Movement Is Dismantling Israel, Not The ’67 Occupation”. “The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two states for two peoples.” The question he chose to ignore – I wonder why? – is this: What are the most likely future scenarios if Israel’s leaders remain totally opposed to the creation of a viable Palestine state on all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with either East Jerusalem its capital or Jerusalem an …
The Odyssey of a Political Prisoner
by Camille Marino / April 2nd, 2014
On Friday, July 13, 2012, I looked into the face of evil. It was the third time in 6 months that the vivisection-state complex had ambushed me, slapped handcuffs around my wrists, and threw me into a cell. As I was led from the courtroom after having had a $500,000 bond placed on my head, my eyes met those of the sadistic dog-murdering vivisector from Wayne State University (WSU). Having accomplished his mission for the vivisectors at the University of Florida (UF), he smiled into my face with a sickening ghoulish grin I’ll never forget. I stared right back at …
by Media Lens / April 2nd, 2014
The new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that the impacts of climate change are likely to be ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’. Impacts include droughts, floods, heat waves, endangered species, crop failure, food insecurity, famine and even war.
But for more than 25 years, since the IPCC was set up in 1988, there have been numerous scientific ‘wakeup calls’ and nothing significant has changed. In fact, turbo-charged, fossil-fuel driven capitalism has proceeded to run amok. And, for the vested interests who are the winners in the global economy, the tiny ‘one per …
And Themselves
by Alton C. Thompson / April 2nd, 2014
In 2008, Royal Dutch Shell developed two sophisticated climate-risk scenarios called Blueprints and Scramble. The first modeled a greener future while the latter predicted–due to government inaction–a future of droughts, floods, heat waves and super storms. By 2012, Shell executives confided to [McKenzie] Funk: “We’ve gone to Scramble. This is a Scramble kind of world. This is what we’re doing.” ((Funk is the author of the recently-published (2014) Windfall. Veteran journalist Funk “Funk traveled the globe for six years, following the money in twenty-four countries to profile ‘hundreds of people who felt climate change would make them rich.’”)) Another …
by Paul Haeder / April 2nd, 2014
. . . the solution is not to toss youthful offenders into jail or prisons. We long ago recognized alcoholism to be a disease, and abandoned efforts to treat alcoholics simply by locking them up. – former Oregon Governor Tom McCall
Cash-only Business
It’s now a cash crop in the minds of Washington farmers, who once voted hard right for Nixon, Apple Pie, Mom, Baseball and Throwing the Book at Potheads.
Maybe apples will take a back seat to cannabis sativa. Some counties like Walla Walla want to capitalize on the wine and recreational reefer business. Imagine …
Poverty and Corruption Stalk South Africa's Presidential Election
by Linn Washington, Jr. / April 2nd, 2014
Shenid Bhayroo was one of the thousand-plus journalists that traveled to South Africa in December 2013 to cover the death of iconic South African leader Nelson Mandela, the former political prisoner and first black president of the southern-most nation on the African continent.
Most of those journalists representing nations worldwide covering the memorial activities for Mandela, reporting on the ‘mood’ in that country, missed the mood Bhayroo saw among many South Africans.
Bhayroo saw a strong public dissatisfaction with the deep poverty rampant across South Africa, poverty many South Africans increasingly blame on failures of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the …
Israel denies justice and therefore does not exist as a legitimate state
by William A. Cook / April 2nd, 2014
Justice and legitimacy are one and inexorably linked to the Charters and Declarations of the United Nations. This is a truth that Michael J. Rosenberg does not address as he castigates the supporters of the BDS movement in his recent article: “The Goal of the BDS Movement is the Dismantling of Israel”, wherein he states:
The reason why BDS keeps failing despite the almost universal recognition that the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the blockade of Gaza, are illegal and immoral is that the BDS movement is not targeting the occupation per se. Its goal is the …
...and Basking Under the Special Protection of Her Majesty's Government
by Stuart Littlewood / April 1st, 2014
The 2014 Annual Congress of the University and College Union Scotland (UCU Scotland) has voted unanimously to condemn the planned visit by Israel’s Tzipi Livni, wanted for war crimes, says StopTheJNF.
In 2009 Livni cancelled a visit to London when she discovered an arrest warrant had been issued against her, along with Ehud Barak and retired general Doron Almog, on the grounds that she had been a member of the Israeli war cabinet which organised the slaughter of more than a 1400 Palestinians. In 2011 she was given a rare diplomatic passport by the UK Government to protect her from …
by Gareth Porter / March 31st, 2014
WASHINGTON, March 31 2014 (IPS) – The Barack Obama administration appears to have rejected a deal-breaking demand by Israel for an Iranian confession to having had a covert nuclear weapons programme as a condition for completing the comprehensive nuclear agreement.
Pro-Israeli commentators have openly criticised the Obama administration for failing to explicitly demand that Iran confess to charges by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of a covert nuclear weapons programme.
Demanding such a confession would be an obvious deal-breaker, because Iran has consistently denied those past charges and denounced the documents and intelligence reports on which they were based as fraudulent. In …
Lenin's State and Revolution, Chapter 3, Part 1
by Thomas Riggins / March 31st, 2014
Chapter Three of State and Revolution is devoted to Lenin’s commentary on Marx’s analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune. It is divided into five parts. This article deals with the first part of the chapter:
1. What Made the Communards Attempt Heroic?
The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and led to the downfall of Louis Napoleon (Emperor Napoleon III) and the Second Empire. The German army surrounded Paris and France was forced to surrender. The war ended on May 10, 1871. The working people of Paris became radicalized during this period, repudiated the legitimacy of the bourgeois government, and started a …
The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israel
by Kim Petersen / March 31st, 2014
by Lesley Docksey / March 31st, 2014
The UK Secretary for the Environment Owen Paterson, called by some the “worst Environment Secretary ever” because of his support for so many ecologically damaging initiatives, disappeared in February. Having been responsible for an expensive and highly unpopular badger cull, he became embroiled in the crisis that brought a lot of southern England to its knees – catastrophic flooding.
Arriving far too late on the scene down in Somerset it was then announced that he had to have emergency surgery for a detached retina – and he totally vanished. He did come back very quietly, but was unavailable to all …
The Power of Media Manipulation
by Ron Jacobs / March 31st, 2014
Strikes by labor have a way of bringing individuals’ consciousness to the foreground. This is especially true when the primary work of the workers on the picket line is serving the public. Teachers, police, firemen, public works and transit workers fall into this category and, when they strike the public feels the difference. In the place I live—Burlington, Vermont—the transit system drivers have been on strike for two weeks. The local media, from the Gannett-owned daily paper to the so-called alternative weekly, has varied in its coverage of the issues, with the bulk of the stories presenting management’s side without …
Part 2 of a 2 Part Series
by Felicity Arbuthnot / March 30th, 2014
One of the delightful things about America is that they have absolutely no historical memory.
— Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, 1898-1976
More verbiage: Russia has taken a “dark path”. Vice President Joe Biden said in Poland last week that those who rely on “aggression and fear” are bound to fail. Indeed, think Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran, the gradual current slinking from Afghanistan after approaching a 13 year reign of terror; creeping from Iraq in the dead of night after eight years of murder, decimation, torture and infanticide, followed by enjoining the destruction of Libya …
by William Boardman / March 30th, 2014
Crimea may be bigger than an archduke, but not more important
If American media seem filled these days with bellicose, jingoistic, uniform perspectives on a new Cold War, that’s probably because so many news outlets can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to framing new events in the tired terms of the last generation’s ingrained propaganda. At a time that needs fresh contemplation, even people like Amy Goodman on Democracy NOW are talking about recent events in and around Ukraine as having “sparked the worst East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War” or words to more …
by Robert Hunziker / March 30th, 2014
According to leaks about the widely anticipated upcoming report by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is due the first week of April, the scientific community is finally taking off the gloves and hitting the public smack dab between the eyes with the brutal truth.
Whereas in the past, IPCC reports were conservatively constructed and couched in scientific lingo that people found difficult to fully understand, this time it is different.
Accordingly, rumor has it that world governments have already signed off on “the critical finding that climate change is already having an effect, and that even a small amount …
A Cross-Cultural Narrative
by Martha Rosenberg / March 30th, 2014
The just published memoir, Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within by Gayathri Ramprasad, is a first-of-its-kind, cross-cultural lens to mental illness through the inspiring story of the author’s thirty-year battle with depression. Gayathri Ramprasad is the Founder and President of ASHA International, a nonprofit organization promoting personal, organizational and community wellness.
Martha Rosenberg: Your book gives vivid images and details of your childhood, growing up in India. It seems like you were never alone, between your immediate family, your extended family and, …
