The sickening terrorist attack carried out in Nairobi is a reminder of one thing among several others; talking points will not suffice when such devastation needs to be properly explained to the public. As Americans are once again forced to brush away the dust atop their maps they hurry to locate Kenya. Yet, as this story has unfolded, Kenya has proven to be just the tip of the iceberg. In order to gain a richer understanding of the terrorist attack in Kenya and its explicit motivations one must dig deeper into an older conflict involving the immediate region’s key player, Somalia.

Without a constant national government from 1991 to 2006, Somalia was essentially a modern day example of a stateless society. Between rampant crime and poverty throughout Somalia, chaos became the norm. To correct this nebulous conception of rule the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was created in the middle of 2004. Designed to impose order and crack down on the escalating crime rates and warlord-style governance, the ICU had another crucial element which cannot go overlooked; it meant to enforce Islamic law on the areas that it controlled.

This article is the foreword to David Swanson's new book, War No More: The Case for Abolition.

I lived in Iraq during the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing. On April 1st, about two weeks into the aerial bombardment, a medical doctor who was one of my fellow peace team members urged me to go with her to the Al Kindi Hospital in Baghdad, where she knew she could be of some help. With no medical training, I tried to be unobtrusive, as families raced into the hospital carrying wounded loved ones. At one point, a woman sitting next to me began to weep uncontrollably. “How I tell him?” she asked, in broken English. “What I say?” She was Jamela Abbas, the aunt of a young man, named Ali. Early in the morning on March 31st, U.S. war planes had fired on her family home, while she alone of all her family was outside. Jamela wept as she searched for words to tell Ali that surgeons had amputated both of his badly damaged arms, close to his shoulders. What’s more, she would have to tell him that she was now his sole surviving relative.

More than 48,000 global citizens have now signed a petition at www.nukefree.org asking the United Nations and the world community to take charge of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. The petition was first linked at Nukefree

Another 25,000 have signed at Roots Action. An independent advisory group of scientists and engineers is also in formation.

The signatures are pouring in from all over the world. By November, they will be delivered to the United Nations.

The corporate media has blacked out meaningful coverage of the most critical threat to global health and safety in decades.

The much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” has turned into a global rout. In the face of massive grassroots opposition and the falling price of renewable energy and natural gas, operating reactors are shutting and proposed new ones are being cancelled.

There’s something profoundly despicable about a Justice Department that would brazenly violate the First and Fourth Amendments while spying on journalists, then claim to be reassessing such policies after an avalanche of criticism -- and then proceed, as it did this week, to gloat that those policies made possible a long prison sentence for a journalistic source.

Welcome to the Obama Justice Department.

While mouthing platitudes about respecting press freedom, the president has overseen methodical actions to undermine it. We should retire understated phrases like “chilling effect.” With the announcement from Obama’s Justice Department on Monday, the thermometer has dropped below freezing.