Tag Archives | War

Lest we forget, an attack on Syria is an attack on Iran and a threat to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

By on January 9, 2013 in News 17

via chycho

United States involvement in Syria has nothing to do with a repressive regime. After all, in 2002 the United States willingly used Assad’s regime to torture Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, when they renditioned him to Syria from New York. The world was also quite grateful to Syria for accepting 1.5 million refugees created by the US invasion of Iraq, especially considering that for approximately the same period the United States had only accepted 7,000 Iraqi refugees. What’s happening in Syria is part of a bigger picture, a grand chessboard if you’d like, and what’s happening there is definitely not the end game.

Irrelevant if Assad stays in power or the rebels take control, what’s important to know about Syria is that an attack on Syria is an attack on Iran and a threat to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – a mutual security organization founded in 2001, which “includes not only the two giants Russia and China, but also the energy-rich Central Asian states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.”

In 2006 Syria signed a defense agreement with Iran.… Read the rest

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or “Moral Injury”?

By on December 28, 2012 in News 3

Picture: USAF (PD)

Shepherd Bliss writes at Counterpunch:

“My God, what have we done?” combat soldiers sometimes gasp as they see those they or comrades just killed, especially when they include innocent children, women, and other civilians.

“We knew that we killed them/…the terrified mother/ clutching terrified child,” writes former Lieutenant Michael Parmeley in his poem “Meditation on Being a Baby Killer.” In l968, Lt. Parmeley led a combat platoon in the American War on Vietnam. He receives benefits for what is clinically described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“My gunner…started to cry,” Parmeley writes. “There’s a myth of recovery,/ that you put it behind you/…but memories aren’t like that/…I know that we killed them.”

Parmeley and I have participated in the Veterans’ Writing Group for twenty years. We attend regular meetings, break silences, tell our stories in a healing context, and listen without judgment. His poem appears in our book “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,” (www.vowvop.org) edited by our writing teacher, award-winning author, and former University of California Berkeley professor Maxine Hong Kingston.

… Read the rest

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The Real Story of the World War I ‘Christmas Truce’

By on December 25, 2012 in News 5

If you can possibly stand another Christmas-related story today, then you might enjoy reading a detailed account of the famous “Christmas Truce” of 1914. It wasn’t formal or widespread, but in isolated areas on the front, men from both sides emerged for their trenches, exchanged meager gifts and even played soccer. (Yes, my European friends, I know it’s “football” – but perhaps we can have a truce of our own?) It’s a bittersweet story: What better reminder of the absurdity of war than enemies briefly united in brotherhood by sport, custom and hospitality? Sadly, the peace wasn’t to last – and in many cases it was squelched from the very beginning by officers eager to continue the war. I can’t read the phrase “return of good old sniping” without my stomach churning…

Via Smithsonian Magazine:

Of course, not every man on either side was thrilled by the Christmas Truce, and official opposition squelched at least one proposed Anglo-German soccer match.

… Read the rest

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‘Peace on Earth’ (1939)

By on December 25, 2012 in News 1

I watch this every year at Christmas time. It frightened the holy hell out of me as a child, but now it just make me think. We’re not any closer to this “peace” we talk about at this time of year, are we? Maybe 2013 will be different. WAR IS OVER! (if you want it.)

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Inside The Army’s Cold War Experiments In Psychochemical Warfare

By on December 14, 2012 in News 2

The New Yorker unravels the military’s secret program to develop the ultimate “humane” weapon for the wars of the future — mass-delirium-inducing gas:

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time became the military’s leading expert in a secret Cold War experiment: to fight enemies with clouds of psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitate the mind-—causing, in the words of one ranking officer, a “selective malfunctioning of the human machine.”

Today, the facility, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings on the Chesapeake Bay. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved.

I spoke to a former Edgewood test subject who was given the nerve agent VX. The effect was rapid. There was a radio on in the room, but the words made little sense.

… Read the rest

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U.S. Army’s Chemical Weapons Expert Reveals Details Of Experiments

By on December 10, 2012 in News 3

Colonel James S. Ketchum, was the U.S. military’s leading expert in a secret Cold War experiment: to fight enemies with clouds of psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitate the mind, reports Raffi Khatchadourian in a lengthy profile for the New Yorker:

…The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein. Ketchum’s specialty was a family of molecules that block a key neurotransmitter, causing delirium. The drugs were known mainly by Army codes, with their true formulas classified. The soldiers were never told what they were given, or what the specific effects might be, and the Army made no effort to track how they did afterward. Edgewood’s most extreme critics raise the spectre of mass injury—a hidden American tragedy.

Ketchum, an unreconstructed advocate of chemical warfare, believes that people who fear gaseous weapons more than guns and mortars are irrational.

… Read the rest

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Drones Are Not A Security Solution

By on December 6, 2012 in News 2

Alternet supremo Don Hazen reports on activist filmmaker extraordinaire Robert Greenwald’s latest campaign, at Salon:

Robert Greenwald, head of the progressive internet video and  documentary film company, Brave New Films, recently traveled to Pakistan, supported financially by hundreds of BNF donors,  to witness firsthand the stories of families who have had innocent loved ones killed by U.S. drone attacks.  Greenwald is challenging both the morality and the factual effectiveness of the U.S drone program as we learn more about the failures and questionable policies.  The  U.S. claims that drone missiles are aimed at  potential terrorists but because the ground rules of who can be targeted is both vague and has  been loosened,  the number of innocents being killed has risen sharply. Furthermore, the information that is used to target people, appears to be the result of a system of bribery at the local level, which is of questionable reliability.

It wasn’t until April 2012 that John Brennan, White House counter-terrorism adviser admitted for the first time publicly, that our government has been using drones in Pakistan, and later Yemen, to attempt to  kill those  they consider as potential terrorists.

… Read the rest

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Are We Headed For A Future Without War?

By on December 6, 2012 in News 5

Our vision of the future typically consists of a vast blighted landscape decimated by nuclear bombs or killer robot drones or battles to control the dwindling supply of water or oil, but a group of Norwegian researchers claim that warfare will become less and less common in coming decades. Could their simulations of a peaceful tomorrow be accurate, or is humanity doomed by aggressive urges? Via TIME:

Global conflicts have in fact been on a downward trend for the last half-century. And a group of researchers in Norway says their data indicates that the future could be even more peaceful.

In a paper soon to be published in International Studies Quarterly, Håvard Hegre, a professor of political science at the University of Oslo, claims that the number of ongoing conflicts will be halved by 2050 — with the greatest decrease coming in the Middle East.

Hegre, along with his colleagues at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, put together a statistical model that took into account factors such as infant mortality, education, youth population, ethnic make-up and conflict history.

… Read the rest

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