Antiwar.com Blog

On tonight’s Tucker Carlson Tonight:

The Selective Service Repeal Act of 2021 (H.R. 2509 and S. 1139) was introduced in Congress on April 14th with bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate.

Initial co-sponsors of the bill to end draft registration and abolish the Selective Service System are Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

"No young person, regardless of gender, should be subject to a military draft or be forced to register for a draft in the United States. The military draft registration system is an unnecessary, wasteful bureaucracy which unconstitutionally violates Americans’ civil liberties. We should be abolishing military draft registration altogether, not expanding it," said Rep. DeFazio.

"If a war is worth fighting, Congress will vote to declare it and people will volunteer," said Sen. Paul.

Continue reading “‘Selective Service Repeal Act’ Introduced in Congress”

A new interview on DW Conflict Zone features Yemeni National Salvation Government (NSG) Foreign Minister Hisham Sharaf, focusing on war crimes in Yemen over the course of the six year war. The NSG is the Sanaa-based government involving the Houthis and other parties opposed to the Saudi invasion. The interview was extremely contentious, with Sharaf objecting to the characterization of himself as a Houthi, noting he is part of the GPC Party and that a lot of figures in the NSG are not Houthis. He also criticized efforts to paint the war crimes of the Houthis as the chief problem in Yemen. Sharaf called for the world to focus on crimes committed by Saudi and Emirati forces, emphasizing hundreds of thousands of Yemenis killed by airstrikes, and insisting that the war crimes were ultimately their fault for starting the war. “We will continue the war if they don’t withdraw from our country,” Sharif noted. The interviewer suggested that there was a lack of accountability on the Houthi side, and cited several UN reports on crimes by their forces. Sharaf addressed some of the allegations, but also claimed not to have gotten UN reports on some of them. He suggested investigation and accountability would be easier if the NSG was allowed to fly out of the capital of Sanaa. Sharaf also sought to emphasize the problem beyond direct participants in the war, attributing international media hostility to the interests of nations like the United States and Britain having provided such a large amount of the bombs dropped on Yemen and being effectively responsible for the killings.

Just two days after speaking with Russian President Putin by phone, and suggesting a summit, President Biden has hit Russia with another round of sanctions – including an attack on the Russian currency. The reasons given for this “national emergency” include the seven year old return of Crimea to Russian control and the still-unproven allegations of Russian election meddling, hacking, and placing bounties on US soldiers’ heads in Afghanistan. Today on the Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to warn against starting a war with Russia.

Denis Halliday is an exceptional figure in the world of diplomacy. In 1998, after a 34-year career with the United Nations – including as an Assistant Secretary-General and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq – he resigned when the UN Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq.

Halliday saw at first hand the devastating impact of this policy that had led to the deaths of over 500,000 children under the age of five and hundreds of thousands more older children and adults, and he called the sanctions a genocide against the people of Iraq.

Since 1998, Denis has been a powerful voice for peace and for human rights around the world. He sailed in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2010, when 10 of his companions on a Turkish ship were shot and killed in an attack by the Israeli armed forces.

I interviewed Denis Halliday from his home in Ireland.

Nicolas Davies: So, Denis, twenty years after you resigned from the UN over the sanctions on Iraq, the United States is now imposing similar “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, denying their people access to food and medicines in the midst of a pandemic. What would you like to say to Americans about the real-world impact of these policies?

Denis Halliday: I’d like to begin with explaining that the sanctions imposed by the Security Council against Iraq, led very much by the United States and Britain, were unique in the sense that they were comprehensive. They were open-ended, meaning that they required a Security Council decision to end them, which of course never actually happened – and they followed immediately upon the Gulf War.

Continue reading “Denis Halliday: A Voice of Reason in an Insane World”