Author: David Swanson

Every Single Member of Congress Is Willing to Let Yemeni Children Die.

If you want to prove that statement wrong, I think you’ll want to start by proving wrong one or more of these five points:

1. A single member of the House or Senate can compel a speedy vote on ending U.S. participation in the war on Yemen.
2. Not one single member has done so.
3. Ending US participation would effectively end the war.
4. Despite the temporary truce, millions of lives depend on ending the war.
5. The passionate speeches in 2018 and 2019 by Senators and Representatives demanding an end to the war when they knew they could count on a veto from Trump have vanished during the Biden years chiefly because Party is more important than human lives.

Continue reading “Every Single Member of Congress Is Willing To Let Yemeni Children Die”

From DavidSwanson.com:

Daniel Ellsberg is a former U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events, and as an author of critically important books, and as a guest on this program and many others. Dan Ellsberg has recently published with Norman Solomon an article in The Nation magazine titled “To Avoid Armageddon, Don’t Modernize Missiles—Eliminate Them.”

When you imagine ending a war, do you imagine the U.S. President lamenting the human cost of the war’s financial expense while simultaneously demanding that Congress increase military spending – and while mentioning new wars that could potentially be launched?

Do you picture him blowing up families with missiles from robot airplanes, and committing to continuing those “strikes” while maintaining that such things don’t constitute continuing the war?

Did you hope that if the wars for freedom ever ended we might get our freedoms back, our rights to demonstrate restored, the Patriot Act repealed, the local police rid of their tanks and war weapons, the landscape stripped of all the cameras and metal detectors and bulletproof glass that have grown up for two decades?

Did you imagine the people in Guantanamo cages who were never on a “battlefield” would no longer be viewed as threats to “return” there once the war was “ended”?

Continue reading “What Ending a War Could Look Like”

Senators Murphy, Lee, and Sanders have introduced legislation to address Congressional and Presidential war powers. (See bill text, press release, one pager, video of press conference, op-ed, and Politico article).

In recent months, we’ve seen efforts to repeal some but not other AUMFs (Authorizations for the Use of Military Force), plus talk of creating a new AUMF (why?!). And for years we’ve watched people like Senator Kaine talk about reclaiming Congressional war powers while pushing legislation to eviscerate them. So, I thought I had reason to worry.

I heard about this new legislation before it appeared from people concerned that it was not going to address the power to impose illegal and deadly sanctions on nations around the world. I thought that was a serious concern. And it turns out to have been well justified, as the bill does not say one word about sanctions. But I was wary of focusing on promoting that improvement to a bill that nobody would show me or tell me what else was in it. Not much point in perfecting a catastrophically bad bill, you know?

Now, to be clear, this bill is not the arrival of peace, sanity, and disarmament. It does not recognize that wars are illegal under the UN Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and various other treaties, and prosecutable by the International Criminal Court. It treats perfectly seriously the question of which branch of government should authorize the worst crime there is, in a manner that would never be applied to, say, Congressional Rape Powers or Congressional Child Abuse Powers.

Continue reading “War Powers Reform Bill Far Better Than Feared”

This week on Talk World Radio: Why won’t disproven Russiagate ever go away? Our guest Ray McGovern was an infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties, and became a CIA analyst. His duties eventually included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing The President’s Daily Brief. He conducted the one-on-one morning briefings of President Reagan’s five most senior national security officials, including VP Bush, from 1981 to 1985. In retirement Ray co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — an attempt by intelligence veterans to hold former colleagues to account for “fixing” intelligence to “justify” wars like Iraq. His website is https://RayMcGovern.com.

Ray’s recent article for Antiwar.com: “The Guardian: Regurgitating the Russia-Gate Canard.”

This Week on Talk World Radio, it’s time to end the terrorism-generating war on terrorism. Our guest is Scott Horton. Scott Horton is the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, and author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and of the new book we’ll be mostly discussing Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.

More information and sources for the podcast here.