Category: News

Last Monday, the Department of Defense held a press conference in which Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook disclosed to reporters that the United States military – at the request of the officially recognized governing body of Libya, the Government of National Accord (GNA) – has begun a campaign of precision airstrikes on ISIL targets inside the northern city of Sirte.

“GNA-aligned forces have had success in recapturing territory from ISIL thus far around Sirte,” Cook stated at the briefing, “and additional U.S. strikes will continue to target ISIL in Sirte in order to enable to GNA to make a decisive, strategic advance.”

The GNA is the interim government created by the U.N. and installed back in March in an effort to combat the instability, infighting – both political and military – and all-around chaos that have engulfed Libya in the years following the US intervention in 2011.

Continue reading “Is This the Real Reason the United States Is Suddenly Bombing Libya?”

Saturday marked the 71st anniversary of U.S. President Harry Truman’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place three days later in 1945. Some 90,000-166,000 individuals were killed in Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing killed 39,000-80,000 human beings. (It has come to my attention that the U.S. military bombed Tokyo on Aug. 14 – after destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito expressed his readiness to surrender.)

There isn’t much to be said about those unspeakable atrocities against civilians that hasn’t been said many times before. The U.S. government never needed atomic bombs to commit mass murder, but it dropped them anyway. (Remember this when judging the official U.S. moralistic stance toward Iran.) Its “conventional” weapons have been potent enough. (See the earlier firebombing of Tokyo.) Nor did it need the bombs to persuade Japan to surrender; the Japanese government had been suing for peace. The U.S. government may not have used atomic weapons since 1945, but it has not yet given up mass murder as a political/military tactic. Presidents and presidential candidates are still expected to say that, with respect to nuclear weapons, “no options are off the table.”

Continue reading “71th Anniversary of the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”

It’s interesting that accusations that Putin is trying to swing the election to Trump peaked, for now, in the midst of the Democratic Convention, and distracted nicely from what was revealed in the hacked emails. Hmmm.

Putin was then ushered off stage, to be replaced by the Wrath of Khan and their son, who died in Iraq 12 years ago. I wonder now when Putin will be brought back. He will of course be brought back, being far too good a bad guy to waste in this most obscene of elections.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no global enemy for America to face down. No big nasty to spur weapons procurement, or to justify a huge standing military with hundreds of bases around the world, or to pick fights with to allow a president down in the polls to morph into a war leader.

Continue reading “Waiting on Putin, The Dream Candidate”

The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it would begin a sustained bombing campaign against ISIS in Libya. The Administration said it was acting in response to a request by the Libyan “Government of National Accord,” which was created by the UN rather than voted in by the Libyan people. Asked about the scope of this new US war on Libya, Pentagon Spokesman Peter Cook said, “We don’t have an end point.” Thus far Congress has been silent on this new war. We are not silent, however. Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

On August 6 each year, the world commemorates the dawn of the atomic age by remembering the obliteration of Hiroshima. In May, President Obama laid a wreath in the Peace Park that marks ground zero there.

This is also the time each year when politicians, historians, veterans, and peace activists revisit the decision to use this new weapon for the first time, then for the second three days later at Nagasaki. The rationales are familiar: nukes would shorten the war, save American lives, and demonstrate the country’s overwhelming military and technological superiority. It did not last long. Stalin mobilized Soviet resources to break the American monopoly soon after receiving intelligence reports on the successful Trinity test in New Mexico. The arms race began to sprint before the nuclear dust settled in Japan.

Continue reading “After Hiroshima and Nagasaki”

The ad pierces your consciousness and catches you by surprise. Plastered on the side of Seattle’s King County Metro it hurls you momentarily back in time, to a time when nuclear weapons were an imminent threat to our survival. Or did the era never end?

The ad – sponsored by local Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action – reads: "20 miles west of Seattle is the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S."

Behind this text is a map, depicting the proximity of Seattle to Naval Base Kitsap, located on the eastern shore of Hood Canal, one of the four main basins in Washington state’s Puget Sound. The base is home port for eight of the US Navy’s 14 Trident ballistic missile submarines as well as an underground nuclear weapons storage complex. Together they’re believed to store more than 1,300 nuclear warheads, according to Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

This is arguably the biggest single concentration of nuclear warheads not only in the US, but in the world.

Continue reading “Massive Deployment of US WMD Spotlighted by Peace Group”