The war drones on

“Complaints about civilian casualties have also stirred concern among human rights advocates.”
The problem is that a sentence like this — arguably a dead sentence, with a few quasi-facts entombed in an inert moral sensibility — parades as serious news. I mean, it’s lifted straight from the New York Times: from a story about drones, the CIA hit list and our cool new PlayStation way of killing bad dudes (and everyone else in the vicinity). Someone with an active conscience could come upon a sentence like that, in the middle of a painfully ill-focused story on the endless war, and think she must be going insane.

As an archeological find, it’s worth examining in closer detail, but first let me put it in context. The use of pilotless aircraft in Pakistan and Afghanistan to assassinate Taliban or al-Qaida leaders and other Islamic, America-hating insurgents — with missiles, no less — seems to have hit a snag of legal controversy lately because of the news that one of the people on the list of targets, Anwar al-Awlaki, was born in New Mexico. He’s an American citizen.

Holding Psychologists accountable for Torture

Today in Albany, NY and Columbus, OH, human rights groups and activists filed formal complaints with state boards which regulate psychologists, against Major John Leso (NY) and ret. Col. Larry James, currently dean of the School of Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton. Two of the four complainants in the Ohio case are NWOPC members: Josie Setzler and Trudy Bond. I have the privilege of co-counseling with the International Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School; some of you met Deborah Popowski from Harvard when she was out here last January.

We seek to have Ohio's Board of Psychology open a full-scale investigation into Dr. James' involvement in torture oversight, management, planning, and calibration while at Gitmo on two different stints. We are demanding that Dr. James' psychologist license be revoked based upon what we believe are not only felony crimes but extremely serious perversions of the healing art of psychology.

I invite you to read both of the complaints. They are heavily researched and meticulously footnoted. The Pentagon has been up to a lot more than is generally understood by way of torture.

Demand justice for war crimes in Darfur

More than 7 years of rape, murder and pillaging have gone unpunished.
For more than 7 years now, alleged war criminals of Darfur have lived freely, while the innocent people in their paths have lived in fear.

But last month, when two Darfuri rebel leaders, suspected of killing peacekeepers, surrendered themselves to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, the wall of impunity finally began to crack.

The suffering in Darfur won't end until all those indicted by the ICC are brought to justice. International justice can't work until there's international cooperation.

In order for the ICC to effectively prosecute those responsible for grave human rights abuses, the international community must do its part to fight impunity.

Urge the U.S. to strengthen its support of the ICC in bringing Darfuri war crimes suspects to justice.

The U.S. has recently taken important steps forward to renew its engagement with the ICC. This shift in U.S. policy signals hope that those who so egregiously abused human rights will finally be held accountable for their crimes.

Confronting rendition to torture in North Carolina

Despite what our leaders may profess, U.S. directed torture continues and efforts to obtain redress for victims and accountability from perpetrators are met with systematic obstruction. We know we cannot rely on government, at any level, to take the initiative for accountability.

But we must not be bystanders.

Six years have passed since the release of the gruesome photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, and it is well past the deadline President Obama set for closing the prison camps at Guantanamo. Yet this Administration has steadfastly refused to seek accountability for U.S.-sponsored torture—the murderous extent of which is still being revealed—and invokes the “state secrets” privilege to obstruct prosecution when torture victims, some released without charge, seek legal redress.

These issues are never easy to confront. They require us to break through our denial, take in the horror, and hold it in awareness while we organize for action.

Letters from Palestine

Kenneth Ring’s writing on Palestine has already received just praise, as it is another in a series of recently published works that cry from the heart of Palestine.[1] And while I have read many other books on Palestine, “Letters from Palestine”, as with others that are set within a personal context, brings forth the undying hope and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of severe hostility from Israel and a careless disregard from most of the western media and governments. What come through uniquely from this work is that of hope combined with youthfulness, that the Palestinian story will surely go on and on as long as there are Palestinians to relate it.

The injustices perpetrated by the Zionists of Israel, supported by the awkward and embarrassing sycophantic participation of the U.S. government (read also military and corporations), cannot endure forever. It is from these letters from Palestine that spring the message that the Palestinians will not grow old and die off and there will be no one left to remember that there was a Palestine. There is life, there is hope, there is memory.

The Second Amendment, Roberts Court version

The peace movement's progress

The peace movement has made significant progress in the United States since its low point of late 2008, and just about everything anyone in it has done has been a contribution. If everyone keeps doing what they're doing, and more of it, we might just end some wars, eventually. But I think some techniques are working better than others, and that pursuing the most strategic approaches would make victory likelier sooner and longer-lasting when it comes.

Unanimous conformity in the Senate

For the warfare state, it doesn’t get any better than 99 to 0.
Every living senator voted Wednesday to approve Gen. David Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Call it the unanimity of lemmings -- except the senators and their families aren’t the ones who’ll keep plunging into the sea.

No, the killing and suffering and dying will be left to others: American soldiers who, for the most part, had scant economic opportunities in civilian life. And Afghans trapped between terrible poverty and escalating violence.

The senatorial conformity, of course, won’t lack for rationales. It rarely does.

An easy default position is that the president has the right to select his top military officers. (Then why is Senate confirmation required?) Or: This is a pivotal time for the war in Afghanistan. (All the more reason for senators to take responsibility instead of serving as a rubber stamp for the White House.)

Millennium goals revisited: noble ideas, and feel-good moments

When the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were first declared, they were met with a sense of promise. A decade later, despite all the official insistence that all is on track, it is increasingly clear that this approach to development was flawed from the onset.

For ten years, numerous committees, international and local organizations and independent researchers have tirelessly mulled over all sorts of indicators, numbers, charts and statistical data relating to extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality, child mortality, and so on.

The conclusions derived from all the data weren’t necessarily grim. And the sincerity of the many men and women who have indefatigably worked to ensure that the eight international development goals – agreed to by all 192 UN member states and over 20 international organizations – were fully implemented, cannot in any way be discounted. They were the ones who brought the issue to the fore, and they continue to push forward with resolve and determination.

Can "emergency" new nuke loans be stopped despite cover of war?

Amidst a grassroots uproar over funding for the military, the nuclear power industry has again forced $9 billion in loan guarantees onto an "emergency" war appropriations bill for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Citizen opposition helped delay a similar vote scheduled last month. Now green energy advocates are again asked to call Congress immediately.

The move comes as part of a larger push for federal funding for a "new generation" of reactors.

Because independent investors won’t fund them, the reactor industry has spent some $645 million in the last decade lobbying Congress and the White House for taxpayer money.

This $9 billion is for two new reactors proposed for the South Texas site, on the Gulf of Mexico, and another at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland.

Continued operations of the two reactors now at South Texas are threatened by oil gushing from BP’s Deepwater Horizon. Calvert Cliffs is just 40 miles from the nation’s capital.

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