Antiwar.com Blog

On Wednesday morning (3/18/15), Google AdSense suspended ad delivery to Antiwar.com demanding that we remove our 11-year-old pages that showed the abuse by US soldiers of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. We publicized this and got a bit of coverage.

Yesterday (3/19/15) Google contacted us and told us that they had given in and would be restoring ad service to Antiwar.com shortly.

However, this morning they contacted us demanding that we remove this article.

Antiwar.com has no intention of allowing Google to dictate our content. We are looking into alternate sources of advertising and will not likely be working with Google AdSense in the future.

Don’t let them get away with it! We need your help today, and you can do that in two ways:

Make a donation to help us recover the lost revenue. We run this web site on a shoestring, and the money we fully expected to bring in from Google ads now puts a big hole our budget. We simply can’t afford to lose this income – but we’re not taking down any of our content. No way, no how! Please make your tax-deductible donation today.

Contact Google ads and give them a piece of your mind. Tell them that you don’t appreciate their efforts on behalf of the Washington censors and demand that they reinstate us immediately.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheater Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Telephone: 650-253-0000
You can also interact with Google at their forum

Thank you to all our supporters.

You can confirm that Antiwar.com is being blocked by going to Adsenseblockchecker.

Continue reading “Google Doubles Down: Demands Review of All Antiwar.com Content”

– because we have a page showing the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Update: After channels of communication were opened as a result of this article on Gawker, Google contacted us and said they would be restoring our ads.

However, Friday morning I received another demand to remove content from our site. Google has decided this page must be removed.

We have no intention of letting Google dictate our editorial policies.

Original post:

On 3/18/15 we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?

This is a big hit on our funding. You can bet the boys in Washington don’t like us and would just love to shut us down.

Don’t let them get away with it! We need your help today, and you can do that in two ways:

1. Make a donation to help us recover the lost revenue. We run this web site on a shoestring, and the money we fully expected to bring in from Google ads now puts a big hole our budget. We simply can’t afford to lose this income – but we’re not taking down the Abu Ghraib page. No way, no how! Please make your tax-deductible donation today.
2. Contact Google ads and give them a piece of your mind. Tell them that you don’t appreciate their efforts on behalf of the Washington censors and demand that they reinstate us immediately.
   Google Inc.
   1600 Amphitheater Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043
   Telephone: 650-253-0000
   You can also interact with Google at their forum

Thank you to all our supporters.

You can confirm that Antiwar.com is being blocked by going to Adsenseblockchecker.

Continue reading “Google Disables All Ads on Antiwar.com (Updated)”

Everyone needs a hobby. For most reporters, it seems to be freaking out about anything even vaguely ISIS-seeming.

That’s where CaliphateBook comes in, which is supposed Facebook, but for ISIS. Cute, right?

The site itself started as an incomplete CMS site, then crashed, (attacked by Anonymous, according to some) and now merely posts a single English-language message denying ties to ISIS.

The registrar information from the site claims the site administrator is in “Mosul, Islamic State.” That anyone can put anything they want in their registrar information seems to be lost on most. While it’s impossible to conclusively disprove that this site is even a thing, the fact that it was registered at GoDaddy certainly points toward it being a hoax.

The original idea of the CIA was to have independent-minded experts assessing both short- and longer-term threats to U.S. national security. Mixing with operations and politics was always a danger, which is now highlighted by CIA Director Brennan’s reorganization, opposed by a group of U.S. intelligence veterans.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: John Brennan’s Restructuring Plan for CIA

Mr. President, the CIA reorganization plan announced by Director John Brennan on Friday is a potentially deadly blow to the objective, fact-based intelligence needed to support fully informed decisions on foreign policy. We suggest turning this danger into an opportunity to create an independent entity for CIA intelligence analysis immune from the operational demands of the “war on terror.”

On Feb. 5, 2003, immediately after Colin Powell’s address to the UN, members of VIPS sent our first VIPS memorandum, urging President George W. Bush to widen the policy debate “beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

The “former senior officers” whom Brennan asked for input on the restructuring plan are a similar closed, blinkered circle, as is the “outstanding group of officers from across the Agency” picked by Brennan to look at the Agency’s mission and future. He did not include any of the intelligence community dissidents and alumni who fought against the disastrous politicization of intelligence before the attack on Iraq. Nor does Brennan’s plan reflect the lessons learned from that debacle.

Continue reading “US Intel Vets Oppose Brennan’s CIA Plan”

When Benjamin Netanyahu looked out over the joint session of Congress that had assembled to hear him speak on March 3, the Israeli prime minister almost caught a glimpse of something unusual: empty seats.

That would’ve been a rarity in Washington, where bipartisan support for the Israeli government runs deep. Just a few years ago, Netanyahu packed the house for a controversial speech on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

This time, nearly 60 Democrats boycotted the address.

That left Republicans scrambling to fill the seats with staffers and allies. They even awarded a plum front-row gallery spot to GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.

What changed?

Netanyahu had come to harangue lawmakers about the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and a group of countries led by the United States.

Continue reading “When Bibi Came to Town”