One argument that’s prevalent in certain circles is that mostly white people, particularly males, care about drones. This argument has become pretty prominent in the age of Obama. It’s typically made by Obama supporters to shut down critics of his counterterrorism policies, such as drone strikes. It’s an asinine argument that marginalizes nonwhite antiwar voices and provides a multicultural veneer to empire. Read the rest of this entry »
Tag Archives: war crimes
Reporting from Guantanamo (June 10 — June 22)
From June 10 to June 22, 2013, I was in Guantanamo Bay Naval Station reporting for Truthout. I covered the military commissions of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To make it easy, I decided to create a blog post with all six of my articles. You can also see them in the “Published Works” section of my site. All of my pieces are below:
- “The Imperialist and Racist Origins of the Guantánamo Penal Colony”, Truthout, June 12, 2013. Read here.
- “US Cold War Ally in the Docks at Guantanamo for USS Cole Bombing”, Truthout, June 17, 2013. Read here.
- “Contention and Confusion in Guantanamo Pre-Trial Hearings for Al-Nashiri Military Commissions”, Truthout, June 18, 2013. Read here.
- “Pretrial Hearings of 5 Suspects in 9/11 Face Challenge of Torture-Obtained Evidence”, Truthout, June 21, 2013. Read here.
- “Military Commission Pre-Trial Hearings for Alleged 9/11 ‘Plotters’ Focus on Gitmo Conditions”, Truthout, June 28, 2013. Read here.
- “Guantanamo and Permanent War: The View From Camp X-Ray”, Truthout, July 3, 2013. Read here.
The Iraq war was not a mistake — it was a crime
As American combat troops left Iraq in December 2011, at that point, the war was largely forgotten by the American public. What remains in public memory are retrospectives of the war, especially on its ten-year anniversary. The dominant narrative is that the Iraq war was a mistake because of the lies or “faulty intelligence” that were used to justify it, costs to the United States, and the strategic folly of invading the country in the first place. However, the war was more than a mistake — it was a crime. Portraying the war as a mistake does three pernicious things: downplay the gravity of the crime, does not question the premises of militarism and permanent war, and perpetuates the myth of American benevolence. Cumulatively, these retrospectives amount to a gross revision of history. Read the rest of this entry »
Liberal support for war and human rights abuses
A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll reveals something quite depressing. The poll shows that a majority of Americans, including many Democrats, support President Obama’s counterterrorism policies of keeping Guantanamo Bay prison open and drone strikes against suspected terrorists abroad. These are policies that Obama and many liberals criticized Bush for doing. But now that Obama is carrying them out, there’s ample support these policies.
Speech: “Imperialism, racism, and torture”
This is the text of a speech I gave at a panel Stanford Says No to War hosted called “It’s All About U.S.: Questioning U.S. Militarism”. This speech was given on May 26th, 2010 and is the last speech I gave at Stanford.
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During the Nuremberg Trials, the chief American prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, famously stated: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” America has a long history of war and its accumulated evils. It began as thirteen small colonies that sat along the Atlantic coast. In over a century, the United States expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean – from sea to shining sea. The process was not pretty. It involved the genocide of the native Americans and the enslavement of millions of black Africans whose free labor was needed to fuel the American capitalist economy. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States began to colonize other lands, such as Hawaii, the Philippines and Cuba. Since then, it has occupied and militarily intervened in several parts of the globe, such as in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. And let’s not forget the many democratically-elected leaders America overthrew in places like Chile and Iran. The United States currently occupies two countries – Iraq and Afghanistan – and has a network of over 700 bases across the planet. Thus, the United States is an empire. Read the rest of this entry »