Wars/Military Spending

By Peter Schurmann
New America Media

The killing of 16 civilians – mostly women and children – by a lone American soldier in Kandahar Province last week has darkened an increasingly ominous cloud hanging over America’s mission in Afghanistan. In its wake, many are asking what sort of justice should be meted out.

For members of the Afghan American community here, the question goes beyond this single tragedy; it has implications for the larger war effort and the future of their homeland.

“Afghans are people of revenge,” says Farid Younos, professor of human development studies at California State University East Bay. “The Qur'an burning was a very serious issue,” he says, “but that is an incident that can be gradually forgotten. Urinating and killing call for revenge.”

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New America Media

The Pentagon’s defiant pledge to stick with the Rush Limbaugh show, no matter what, bumps up against a few hard and insulting realities. The Armed Forces Network that carries the Limbaugh show is not a private business that can do whatever it pleases with its money, personnel and policy. Every penny of the armed forces’ bloated budget comes from taxpayers. The Armed Forces Network, which has aired the Limbaugh show for two decades, has an estimated $27 million annual budget, every penny of which comes from the pockets of taxpayers. And since the military is not a democracy, and decisions are made top down, there was never any chance that taxpayers would have any say about the use of their money to subsidize the blatant bias of one radio jock.

By Andrew Lam
New America Media

Each time Uncle Sam ventures abroad he leaves an unfinished story, and nowhere is it most unfinished than the story of Iraq, where despite flowery speeches regarding freedom and sovereignty by the Obama administration, despite assurances that tyranny has been "cast aside," the tragedy caused by the United States invasion, occupation and inevitable abandonment is on an epic proportion.

Never mind that sectarian violence continues unabated and much of the populace remains mired in poverty, and that there's a distinct possibility that the country is on its way to becoming a failed state if the Sunnis and Shiites cannot find a way to collectively govern.

By Andrew Lam
New America Media

American wars used to end decisively. When Americans came back from defeating the Germans after World War II, there were ticker-tape parades. When the last U.S. helicopter lifted off from Saigon, Vietnam on April 30, 1975, the image seared deep into the American psyche; it spelled an ignominious end.

For the first time in its history, America had been defeated. Its ally, South Vietnam, fell to communist hands. Several generations grappled with their nation’s foreign policies and the meaning of such “hell in a small place,” reexamining their role in the war, whether as participants and supporters, or dissenters and protesters. Vietnam changed the nation’s outlook on the world and its place in it. Since then we have been trying to kick the Vietnam syndrome. We have been searching for victory.

Fast forward to Dec 15, 2011.

By Andrew Lam
New America Media

Numerologists and The History Channel, known for its occult versions of world events, will have their heyday with two digits that, when arranged in certain sequence, foretold the fortunes of America. They are 9/11, of course, and now, 99:1.

The former entered American psyche like a bullet a decade ago, sinking so deeply into our collective wound that the evocation of its memories – exploding planes and falling glass towers, a fabled city shrouded in soot and dust, crushed bodies and a hole in the ground -- spurred two costly wars overseas. Indeed, some historians propose that 9/11 drove the American empire onto the path of self-destruction; the most powerful country on earth a decade later found itself teetering at the edge of an economic abyss as a direct result.

Nine. One. One. 9/11. Emergency. Crisis. Sorrow. War. Mistakes. Recession. The Lost Decade.

By Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford
TruthOut and ACLU Massachusets

Surveillance now is everyone's business, as the line between intelligence-gathering and crimefighting rapidly fades and the public is conditioned to play its part. The work of Deputy Police Chief Michael Downing of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) exemplifies the new surveillance paradigm. The head of the 750-strong counterterrorism force within the LAPD, he is on the hunt for "people who follow al-Qaeda's goals and objectives and mission and ideology." He says his officers collect intelligence and practice the "essence of community policing" by reaching out to Muslims and asking them to "weed out" the "hard-core radicals."

By Rick Reyes
Veterans Caucus, California Democratic Party

The report Saturday that the crash of a Chinook helicopter killed 30 U.S. troops in Afghanistan is just one more sad reason we need to end operations sooner rather than later in that theatre of war. I've been there and we need to get our brothers and sisters home now.

It was the deadliest day for our U.S. troops in Afghanistan since it began in 2001. These men and women have real families and friends who will never see them again. This is part of a continuing tragedy playing out in Afghanistan.

When a majority of Americans believe this war is not worth fighting for, and when a majority of Americans decide they want the US out of Afghanistan, from that moment on, every life of one of our service members lost is a dishonor to the commitment and sacrifice they've made for their values of freedom and democracy.

By Randy Shaw
Beyond Chron

In 2008, young people and longtime non-voters set cynicism aside to mount a national grassroots campaign to elect a President vowing to enact Change We Can Believe In. But in 2011, these hopes have been dashed, a victim of a political system that promotes minority rule and of a President who prefers to work within the political mainstream and favors compromise to conflict. Millions who once believed that a Democratic President and Democratic-controlled House and Senate would set the nation on a new course now fear that a Republican President will make a troubling status quo even worse. Can hope for national progressive change be kept alive? In hindsight, activists should have taken it upon themselves to become the vessels of hope rather than trusting Barack Obama. But at this political moment, it is Obama who is best positioned to restore the hopes of his core supporters. Here are five quick actions he can take to raise the spirits of his base before the 2012 elections.

By Norman Solomon

In times of war, U.S. presidents have often talked about yearning for peace. But the last decade has brought a gradual shift in the rhetorical zeitgeist while a tacit assumption has taken hold -- war must go on, one way or another.

“I am continuing and I am increasing the search for every possible path to peace,” Lyndon Johnson said while escalating the Vietnam War. In early 1991, the first President Bush offered the public this convolution: “Even as planes of the multinational forces attack Iraq, I prefer to think of peace, not war.” More than a decade later, George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress: “We seek peace. We strive for peace.”

While absurdly hypocritical, such claims mouthed the idea that the USA need not be at war 24/7/365.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.