Dan Sanchez, Author at Antiwar.com Blog

Will Grigg Was a Mighty Voice for Justice and Liberty

William Norman Grigg died this afternoon. He was a journalist, broadcaster, editor, musician, father, husband, and a self-described Christian Individualist. He was also my hero.

Will’s main beat was stories about individual victims of the state: particularly Americans who have been unjustly imprisoned or wrongfully assaulted by government officers. His research for each article was exhaustive. From his home in Idaho, he traveled all around the northwest to get the story in person. He would get to know each subject personally, and seek face-to-face interviews with their powerful persecutors. His tireless work has saved several innocent lives from being slowly drained away in prison. He wrote so many pieces about Christopher Tapp, a man who has spent two decades in prison for a murder he did not commit, that the Libertarian Institute, where he was managing editor, will publish a whole book collecting them.

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Iran Frees Americans as Sanctions Are Lifted, Frustrating Warmongers Around the World

Iran has freed four dual-nationality prisoners, including an American/Iranian pastor and an American/Iranian Washington Post reporter who had been accused of working for the U.S. to foment regime change in Iran. The release was part of a prisoner swap, in which seven Iranians imprisoned in the U.S. over sanction violations were also freed. A fifthAmerican was freed by Iran outside of the swap.

Within hours of the release, devastating international sanctions on Iran were lifted after international inspectors verified its compliance with the terms of last year’s nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers.

Taken together, the prisoner swap, Iran’s compliance with its nuclear-deal commitments, and the sanction relief mark what may be a historic thaw in relations between the U.S. and Iran. This, however, should not be exaggerated, as the U.S. continues many belligerent policies directed at Iran, especially in the realm of proxy warfare (see below).

The developments at least mark a short term political triumph for the chief negotiators of the nuclear deal: the administrations of U.S. President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Rouhani was elected on the basis of his campaign promise to negotiate detente with the U.S. and to accomplish economic relief from sanctions for the Iranian people. Parliamentary elections in Iran will be held late next month, making the lifting of the sanctions exceedingly well-timed for Rouhani’s political party.

Conversely, the thaw is a supreme setback to Rouhani’s political rivals, the hardliners in Iran who have strenuously opposed the nuclear deal.

The hardliners in the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia are certainly furious as well.

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A NATO Country Just Shot Down a Russian Bomber: It’s Time to Start Paying Attention

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A Turkish fighter plane shot down a Russian bomber near the Syria-Turkey border early this morning. Turkey claims the Russian aircraft violated its airspace, while Russia claims it was flying over Syria. Oddly enough, both claims could conceivably be simultaneously true in a sense, but only because Turkey has infringed on Syrian sovereignty by extending its airspace five miles over Syrian territory.

The pilots were able to eject and begin parachuting down, but they were executed in mid-air by gunfire from fighters on the ground. The fighters were insurgents who have been battling the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad in a war that has been raging since 2011. A video has emergedshowing insurgents standing over one of the dead Russian pilots.

A Russian helicopter searching for the downed pilots was also shot down, possibly with a U.S.-supplied anti-tank missile.

Turkey is a member of NATO, which means if it enters a war with Russia, it can drag the United States and most of Europe along with it. Such a war could rapidly go nuclear. In October, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stollenberg vowed military support if Turkey went to war with Russia.

Turkey is part of a U.S.-led coalition that has been training, financing, and arming the insurgents trying to overthrow Assad. Syrian regime change is official U.S.policy. That coalition also includes the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others. Israel has bombed the Syrian military directly. The insurgency those powers are supporting is dominated by radical Islamist mujahideen militias, including ISIS, Al Nusra (the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda), and others.

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Why Only Free Speech Gives Safe Space to the Oppressed

Social justice protests have been roiling American universities, even causing administrative heads to roll. To a significant degree, these campus uprisings have been characterized by an impulse to restrict speech and expression for the sake of creating “safe spaces” for marginalized groups. However, speech restriction is a double-edged sword that can just as easily injure the very people campus activists seek to help.

The turmoil at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) in particular was sparked by racial incidents. And the protesters are closely aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement, which combats police brutality against black Americans. However, cops themselves have recently sought to restrict speech and expression in order to insulate that very brutality from criticism.

As William N. Grigg wrote last year:

“The NYPD has now added its name to the roster of Officially Protected Victims by filing ‘hate crimes’ charges against 36-year-old Rosella Best, who had tagged police vehicles and a public school with anti-NYPD graffiti. Among the entirely defensible sentiments inscribed by Best are ‘NYPD pick on the harmless,’ ‘NYPD pick on the innocent,’ and?—?in a display of familiar but increasingly justified hyperbole?—?‘NAZIS=NYPD.’ (Assuming that Ms. Best used only ‘public’ property as her canvas, it’s difficult to identify an actual victim in this case.)”

And earlier this year, the Fraternal Order of Police demanded that Congress extend such special protection to the federal level.

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A Two-Step Disengagement Would Eliminate ISIS

Bombing cities, as France did yesterday, and as the US and Russia continue to do, will only create more radicalization by killing still more civilians. Want to eradicate ISIS?

Step 1: The West should just stop supporting the Syrian insurgency, and stop supporting the Gulf States that are also supporting the insurgency. With the flow of weapons and money halted, rebels will defect, and the ground forces of the secular Syrian regime that the US has been trying to overthrow will be able to push ISIS and Syrian Al Qaeda out of Syria.

Step 2: The US should stop supporting the sectarian Shiite government in Iraq. Only then will that government be willing to compromise with the Sunnis they have been ethnic cleansing for so long, and only then will the tribal Sunnis feel they can afford to turn against ISIS again, as they did in 2006. This will give the Salafists fleeing Syria nowhere to run to.

Just stop constantly making everything worse. Just stop intervening.

The Paris Attacks Were Probably All About the “Grayzone”

Tragically, with today’s attacks on Paris, the cycle continues apace. As I wrote in March:

“To take a more recent example, as Juan Cole convincingly argued, the unjust violence of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris were meant to polarize or “sharpen the contradictions” between Muslims and non-Muslims in France by provoking unjustly violent oppression:

‘Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.’ (…)

The neocons and the terrorist leaders, as Justin Raimondo put it, are “funhouse mirror counterparts” of each other. Both “see world events through a Manichean prism,” and seek to more completely realize that severe dualism by polarizing the world into two irreconcilable camps deadlocked in a civilizational Ragnarök. To this end, each pursues innocent-consuming savagery, and each counts on and even hopes for like savagery from the other.”

In fact, as I just learned tonight on Twitter, in one of its own publications following that attack, ISIS wrote of driving to “extinction” the “grayzone” between Islamic extremism and “the crusader coalition.” Again, it’s all about using terrorism to “sharpen the contradictions” and polarize the world.

And now indeed French president Hollande has said, “To all those who have seen these awful things, I want to say we are going to lead a war which will be pitiless.”

And there are even unconfirmed reports of a Calais migrant camp being set on fire.

Enough with this madness. Break the damn cycle. Stop being manipulated by extremists on both sides. This is the only world we have.