Posts Tagged ‘us’

Exposing Torture to Transparency

Monday, April 25th, 2011

More than 700 leaked secret files on the Guantanamo detainees lay bare the inner workings of America’s controversial prison camp in Cuba. Files obtained by the website Wikileaks have revealed that the US believed many of those held at Gitmo were innocent or only low-level operatives.

The leak depicts a system often focused more on extracting intelligence than on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters. The documents also reveal US authorities relied heavily on information obtained from a small number of detainees under torture.

The Pentagon said the files’ release could damage anti-terrorism efforts, mostly because they expose the hypocrisy and inherent flaws of US foreign policy, where terrorism is used on innocent people in a bid to reduce terrorism.

ColbertPAC Morphs Into SuperPAC

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

(Suck it, Federal Election Commission!)

Like a Phoenix from the ashes, Stephen Colbert’s newly founded ColbertPAC was axed by execs only to rise again from the sea of red tape.

Lawyers from The Colbert Report’s parent company Viacom were afraid that using resources from the popular fake-news show would be a violation of federal election law, which says corporations cannot donate to PACs. However, thanks to last year’s ‘Citizens United‘ ruling in the Supreme Court, corporations can now donate unlimited funds to political issues in the form of a SuperPAC.

Slap a new cover letter onto the old forms designed for actual people, and voila, a corporation is free to further any political agenda it may have. Sounds a bit sketchy, right? Surely this could easily benefit powerful business institutions at the expense of the population, so how could US lawmakers enable such an egregious affront to democracy?

Sadly, the answer is that they’re only doing what their predecessors have been doing for years. Legislation like Citizens United are just the latest in a century’s worth of incremental power grabs. Big business has been systematically buying more and more influence over the American political system for so long that they now have more control than ever before.

As frustrating and scary as it is to see corporations exert such tremendous influence over the electoral system, we cannot be too critical of regular Americans for allowing their political and economic institutions to run amok. Sure, the US people ultimately accountable for their government, but they’re up against some powerful and complex forces.

We can, however, remain hopeful that, as the dehumanized face of corporatism reveals itself to the American public, they will come together to enact revolutionary changes to their country. Until then, we can support boat-rockers like Colbert, and let the unfettered United States of Corporations serve as a example for us to try and avoid.

Lambasting the Libyan Intervention

Friday, March 25th, 2011

(Canadians aren’t the only ones with ‘no-confidence‘ heads of state.)

Nearly a week into the world’s latest military endeavor in Libya, and there is no shortage of criticism.

Brendan O’Neill with Spiked takes aim at the clueless leadership opting for intervention:

The grotesque competition between Britain, France and America to see who can fire the most missiles at Libya confirms the emergence of a new form of Western militarism.

This is not the return of the politics of Empire or a re-flourishing of Western colonialism in north Africa, as some have claimed. Rather it is the barbarism of buffoons….

In the rubble of various compounds and airfields in Libya, we can spy the incoherence of the Western political elites, and their elevation of the reckless, narcissistic politics of short-term gain over anything resembling a strategy or aim.

George Galloway has been speaking out against the double standards of the invading forces, saying:

There are more innocent protesters being gunned down in Yemen but no one would dream of invading or imposing a no-fly zone on Yemen because Yemen doesn’t have oil.

It is so transparently an attempt to protect western companies massive investments in Libya that it’s discredited in the Arab world.

Galloway’s thoughts are echoed by radio host Stephen Lendman, who says that, unlike with Bahrain or Yemen, Libya’s corrupt dictator isn’t on favorable terms with the US, leaving it free to be attacked. Lendman also claims the “naked aggression” we see today was “actually planned many months in advance.”

If what Lendman is saying is true, then Americans (and the world) fell for the same old trick, hook line and sinker. Pretty soon, occupying forces will be sent in. Huge fortunes will be wasted. Countless innocent lives stand to be lost.

Dammit! The US Military Industrial Complex now has a brand new war to perpetuate indefinitely, and I didn’t even see it coming.

Iraqi Birth Defects Linked to US Weapons

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

Toxicological research from Ann Arbor  has linked US weapons to birth defects in Iraq. As if the bombs blowing up civilians weren’t bad enough, now the bomb residue is poisoning the survivors.

Wars are senseless and they need to stop.

Come together, people of the world, and see how we are really only fighting ourselves! See how wars only hurt us as individuals and as a species!

The time has come to embrace our global citizenship and forever banish war from our world. It’s not impossible.

In fact, it has already begun to happen. The Internet has already brought our world together like never before. With this newfound interconnectedness, we’ll see how most of the world’s people aren’t all that different and we don’t massive armies to resolve our disputes.

As well, this migration online will make our world more self-aware, so much that we’ll be able to feel the pleasure and pain from the rest of humankind. When awareness of the world’s suffering increases,  it will be eased by an equivalent response from humanity’s inherent compassion.

On top of this, we’ll ultimately see how we aren’t alone. In fact, we have a whole world of fellow humans willing to openly say “NO!” to injustice, provided others are saying it too. And this is perhaps the most important step… learning of the tremendous power in numbers and how, once united, there is nothing the human race cannot accomplish.

We are building a more just global civilization!

US Military attacks Iraqi Civilians

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

By now you’ve probably heard of the leaked video showing US soldiers opening fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians.  If not, see below for some clips of the video.

This video is hard to watch.  A group of mostly unarmed men gunned down, some of whom were Reuters journalists.  An injured man struggles, crawling down the sidewalk, trying to escape.  Other unarmed civilians come to his aid, trying to be good Samaritans, only to be shot and killed by the crew of the US Apache.  Very ugly.

This is doubly true when we hear the crewmen saying things like “Come on, let us shoot!,” “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” or when hearing how a little girl had been shot… “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”

As Wikileaks editor Julian Assange says, what we see here is the corruption of the US soldiers by war itself.  The crew have been desensitized to their own actions.  They see it as being a video game, the targets dehumanized.  The humans they are killing aren’t even human… they’ve become objects.

This video, while very grotesque, is an everyday occurrence in Iraq.  About 100,000 civilians have died since the US invaded Iraq (source: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) meaning on average 40 innocent people have died every day, in this now 7 year campaign.  Of course, there is no justification for the loss of these lives and no way to rationalize these deaths as anything other than tragic.

But what this video does highlight is how the wholesale slaughter of fellow humans has become institutionalized.  Modern war has become a process, a routine… like cars being built on an assembly line.  But instead of making vehicles, the war industry makes death and pain, with the by-products being fear and hate.

Even if the war in Iraq ends, which is becoming more likely everyday, the war machine will still look for more places to attack.  They will spread propaganda about a new threat, a new country to invade to create another stage on which to set up their assembly line of death.

The soldiers in these videos are not to blame, they are only doing what they believe is the right thing to do.  It is their job, their occupation, to kill people.  (Of course, if you give someone a hammer, pretty soon everything begins to look like a nail.) But it is not their job to stop the war.

Rather, it is up to everyone else to decide to stop this nonsense.  It is up to the American people to recognize that war is not the answer and  order the government to withdraw.  It is up to the world’s people to stand up against war, and rise up against institutionalized armed conflict wherever it arises.

War will not end itself on its own… it is up to us – the world’s people – to bring an end to war.