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Bergdahl: “Traitor to American Exceptionalism and White Supremacy”
“Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s guilty plea begins the end of this phase of an embarrassing, sad and morally absurd saga of American history.”
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Somalia Bombing
“This shows the failure of the international community to bring peace to Somalia. Drones and military forces with no real strategy for stability just produce more violence. The African Union force is a conventional army up against guerrilla fighters and I have little faith they will prevail. They have Mogadishu, but al-Shabab has much of the rest of the country. The African Union force is partnering with Kenya and Ethiopia, which want to gerrymander Somalia. This undermines any serious attempt at stabilizing Somalia.”
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Is “Fake News” Scare Being Used to Stifle Dissent?
“As tech companies prepare to cooperate with intelligence agencies, and their owners inch closer to steering corporate media both indirectly and directly, it becomes ever more urgent to recognize the irony of it all: Centrist alarmism doesn’t destroy harmful propaganda — it creates it.”
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Assessing Karzai’s Charge of U.S. Backing ISIS in Afghanistan
“American allies, including Israel, still support these jihadist groups directly in Syria, as well as Yemen. It would be naive, based upon decades of American covert actions and wars, to imagine the U.S. is not involved and complicit at some level with that support in these multiple countries, even if it is just approval from senior officials in Washington, DC.”
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Jailing a Grandma for Allegedly Protesting Drone Killings
‘Who is the real victim here? The commander of a military base whose drones kill innocent people halfway around the world, or those innocent people who are the real ones in need of protection from the terror of U.S. drone attacks?’
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“Russiagate Is More Fiction Than Fact”
“For privileged Americans to challenge Trump mainly over Russia is to do so in a way that avoids confronting their own relationship to the economic and political system that many of his voters rebelled against. ‘If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, if the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian intelligence services and an American campaign,’ to borrow a scenario posed by Rachel Maddow, then there is nothing else to confront. …”
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Nuclear Ban Treaty Group Gets Nobel
“Upon the adoption of the ban treaty, the United States, United Kingdom and France issued a statement that ‘We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it’ as it ‘does not address the security concerns that continue to make nuclear deterrence necessary’ and will create ‘even more divisions at a time … of growing threats, including those from the DPRK’s ongoing proliferation efforts.’ Ironically, North Korea was the only nuclear power to vote for the ban treaty, last October, when the UN’s First Committee for Disarmament forwarded a resolution for ban-treaty negotiations to the General Assembly.”
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Puerto Rico: * Debt Burden * Medicaid Crisis
“…over the last year or so, the U.S. federal government has made this economic crisis much worse. The Obama administration — with input from Republican congressional leaders — appointed a fiscal oversight board that imposed a draconian austerity plan on Puerto Rico in response to the island’s default on its $74 billion dollar debt. The plan [PDF] proposed by this board was rejected by creditors who — amazingly — wanted to squeeze even more out of Puerto Rico. But regardless, the austerity condemns the island to a second lost decade and more.”
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Left-Right Alliance Against U.S.-Saudi War on Yemen
“Yemen continues to suffer in silence as the world turns away from its ongoing misery. Despite two and a half years of brutal war, the average American remains oblivious to the inconvenient truth that the United States has been helping Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates destroy a sovereign country that posed a threat to no one. While rich Arab states bombard the Middle East’s poorest country, creating the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and an unprecedented cholera outbreak, our government (starting with the Obama administration and continuing with Trump’s) has continued to support them not only through the sale…
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Guns, Terrorism and a “Culture of Killing”
“Given that a primary means to conflict resolution deployed by powerful governments with every tool of diplomacy at their disposal has become homicide, perhaps it should be unsurprising that factions and individuals with no institutional power should take up arms as well.”
Blog
“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn