Category: News

A week and a half ago, I blogged about an ongoing story in Oakley, Michigan, which is not that far from here and which I’ve been keeping an eye on. People are apparently picking up the story now outside of the local news, and it’s getting some new info.

For those who don’t remember, the village has 290 people and a massive police department that is funded through secret “donations.” The names of the police are a secret, including from the village government, and when they approved the release of the names, police claimed ISIS might kill the police if they knew who they were.

Vocativ has a great piece on it now, which includes an admission from the village’s part-time police chief Robert Reznick that the ISIS threat might be “far-fetched,” but that that “doesn’t matter” and that the names should remain secret.

Reznick all but admits that he’s selling badges in a money-making scheme, but insists that it’s not illegal, and that the village needs the money. The Vocativ report includes claims that not only are people buying badges for the higher-end gun permit, but because they can use it to access police records in a way that civilians could not. The number of police is still unknown, but is believed to be at least 100.

The village council has shut the police down, and the courts have finally ordered them to stay shut down, at least until next week’s election installs a new council which could restore them. The council has also requested the police to return all their equipment, which they’ve refused to do, and which has led the council to asking the Michigan State Police to try to recover the property “stolen” by former police.

Yet the village has no record of what all that property consists of, let alone who these former police are, so the request to recover the gear is an exercise in futility, and will likely remain unresolved while the state investigates the department for selling badges and decides whether or not that’s actually something anyone can just do.

Though Antiwar.com covers the vast majority of English-language news sites 7 days a week, and 365 days a year, it’s inevitable that sometimes we miss stories that received sparse coverage.

On Sunday, October 19, an Israeli settler ran over a pair of 5-year-old Palestinian girls returning home from kindergarten. One of the girls was killed. The story was mentioned on only a handful of sites, and went basically unreported in Europe, North America, and indeed Israel itself.

The hit-and-run story would’ve been particularly important, contextually, because just a day later a Palestinian driver crashed into a crowd of Israelis in East Jerusalem, killing an Israeli infant and wounding eight others.

Though we still don’t know if the Monday incident was intentional or not, coming just a day after a similar incident on Palestinian children would’ve been a much different story, and it makes it more likely the incident was the sort of revenge we see so often in the region.

Though Israel’s media always covers Israeli deaths more substantially than Palestinian ones, the fact that there was no coverage at all, and no mention of it in the context of the Monday incident, is extremely unusual.

It is impossible to confirm, naturally, but such a lack of coverage typically means the Israeli military is using its censorship powers to try to bury the story. As of Sunday the settler responsible had not been caught, and there is no indication one way or another if he has been since.

Statist politicians of both the left and the right – John McCain, Robert Reich, Charley Rangel – keep asserting a claim the lives of young people. And if conscription into the military creates resistance, they are always ready with something called "national service."

This week on the Podcast, Ron Paul calls mandatory national service not just anti-liberty, but un-American. And has anybody in Washington bothered to read the 13th Amendment which forbids "involuntary servitude"?

Listen HERE.

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Charles Goyette is New York Times Bestselling Author of The Dollar Meltdown and Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. Check out Goyette and Paul’s national radio commentary: Ron Paul’s America. Goyette also edits The Freedom and Prosperity Letter.

Earlier this week, the federal government’s National Science Foundation, an entity created to encourage the study of science – encouragement that it achieves by awarding grants to scholars and universities – announced that it had awarded a grant to study what people say about themselves and others in social media. The NSF dubbed the project Truthy, a reference to comedian Stephen Colbert’s invention and hilarious use of the word “truthiness.”

The reference to Colbert is cute, and he is a very funny guy, but when the feds get into the business of monitoring speech, it is surely no joke; it is a nightmare. It is part of the Obama administration’s persistent efforts to monitor communication and scrutinize the expressions of opinions it hates and fears.

We already know the National Security Agency has the digital versions of all telephone conversations and emails sent to, from or within the U.S. since 2005. Edward Snowden’s revelations of all this are credible and substantiated, and the government’s denials are weak and unavailing – so weak and unavailing that many NSA agents disbelieve them.

Continue reading “Chilling Free Speech”

Imal, a 7-year-old Afghan student in the 2^nd grade, came to visit us in Kabul.

As Imal grew up, he kept asking his mother where his father was. His mother finally told Imal that his father had been killed by a drone when he was still a baby.

If you could see Imal in this video you would want to hug Imal immediately.

If Imal were a white American kid, this tragedy would not have befallen his father. Which American would allow any U.S. citizen to be killed by a foreign drone?

Suppose the UK wanted to hunt "terrorists" in the US, with their drones, and every Tuesday, David Cameron signed a "secret kill list" like Obama does. Drones operated from Waddington Base in the UK fly over US skies to drop bombs on their targets, and the bombs leave a 7-year-old American kid, say, John, fatherless.

John’s father is killed, shattered to charred pieces by a bomb, dropped by a drone, operated by a human, under orders from the Prime Minister /Commander-in-Chief.

"John, we’re sorry that your father happened to be near our ‘terrorist’ target.’ He was collateral damage. It was ‘worth it’ for the sake of UK national security."

Unfortunately, no US official or military personnel had met with Imal’s widowed mother to apologize.

Continue reading “My Father Was Killed by a Computer, Says 7-Year-Old Afghan Child”

On August 9, 1983, three people dressed as U.S. soldiers saluted their way onto a US military base and climbed a pine tree. The base contained a school training elite Salvadoran and other foreign troops to serve dictatorships back home, with a record of nightmarish brutality following graduation. That night, once the base’s lights went out, the students of this school heard, coming down from on high, the voice of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

 “I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression.”

The three in the tree with the loudspeaker weren’t soldiers – two of them were priests. The recording they played was of Archbishop Romero’s final homily, delivered a day before his assassination, just three years previous, at the hands of paramilitary soldiers, two of whom had been trained at this school.

Fr. Larry Rosebaugh, (who was killed in Guatemala on May 18, 2009), Linda Ventimiglia, and Fr. Roy Bourgeois, (a former missioner expelled from Bolivia who was later excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church because of his support for women’s ordination) were sentenced to 15-18 months in prison for the stirring drama they created on the base that night. Romero’s words were heard loud and clear, and even after military police arrived at the base of the tree and stopped the broadcast, Roy Bourgeois, who would later found a movement to close the school, continued shouting Romero’s appeal as loudly as he could until he was shoved to the ground, stripped, and arrested.

As we approach the nightmare of renewed, expanded US war in Iraq, I think of Archbishop Romero’s words and example. Romero aligned himself, steadily, with the most impoverished people in El Salvador, learning about their plight by listening to them every weekend in the program he hosted on Salvadoran radio. With ringing clarity, he spoke out on their behalf, and he jeopardized his life challenging the elites, the military and the paramilitaries in El Salvador.

Continue reading “Stop the Killing: Kathy Kelly”