| Old Articles | | Sunday, August 01 | | · | Arabs' ties with Israel damages the Palestinian cause |
| Friday, July 30 | | · | Why Muslims Should Rethink Palestine |
| · | Venezuela: We cannot sail towards socialism on the capitalist Ship of State |
| Wednesday, July 28 | | · | WikiLeaks "Afghan War Diaries" |
| Tuesday, July 27 | | · | Class Struggle and Consciousness in Venezuela: Some Socialist Reflections |
| · | Iran's nuclear standoff: who is the loser? |
| Friday, July 23 | | · | The Palestinian Authority's Redundant But Dangerous Language |
| Wednesday, July 21 | | · | Oil Leaks in the Gulf of Mexico threatening all Plant, Animal and Human Life |
| Sunday, July 18 | | · | Pentagon's Growing Robot Capability Transforming Warfare |
| Saturday, July 17 | | · | On the road to defeat in Afghanistan |
| · | Beyond Violence and Non-Violence: Resistance as a Culture |
| · | Learning from Iran |
| Wednesday, July 07 | | · | Some Thoughts on "Patriotism" Written on July 4th |
| Saturday, July 03 | | · | Barack Obama: Are we moving from the Slave to the Nuclear Holocaust? |
| · | World Cup 2010: Bend It Like Imperialism! |
| Thursday, July 01 | | · | Death Squad Terror in Honduras |
| Wednesday, June 23 | | · | Venezuela: What should never happen in the Orinoco Delta |
| Thursday, June 17 | | · | Echoes of Vietnam: Washington's False Promise in Afghanistan |
| Wednesday, June 16 | | · | Afghanistan: The Longest Lost War |
| Tuesday, June 15 | | · | Crimes by Israel, Sanctions for Iran |
Older Articles
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 | | Latin America: Colombia's Controversial Transition: Uribe's Parting Shot
Thursday, August 26 @ 18:03:16 AST |  By Laura Carlsen
August 26, 2010 - counterpunch.org
The rupture of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Colombia after a special session of the OAS on July 22 marks increased animosity between the outgoing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez.
The dispute between the two bombastic leaders from opposite political poles is nothing new. What creates the drama—and the possibilities—of this new turn of events is the backdrop.
Uribe is a lame duck, since being denied a constitutional amendment to run for a third term. His successor, Juan Manuel Santos, took office on August 7. Santos’ inauguration marks the end of the eight-year reign of Uribe, whose military strategies to counter drug runners and guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) have been backed by the U.S. government to the tune of some $7 billion dollars. While leading to some advances in reducing assassinations and kidnappings in Colombia, these strategies failed to achieve peace, and the Colombian conflict continues to take lives and cause tension throughout the region.
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Latin America: “The world is changing, the US is not” – Nicaraguan President
Tuesday, August 24 @ 01:17:32 AST |  August 23, 2010
http://rt.com
Washington has an expansionary policy in which Latin America is simply a backyard for US military bases, believes Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega.
In an exclusive interview with RT, he said it is time for Latin American countries to unite against what they call a policy of aggression.
RT: Comandante, thank you for joining us today. Regarding the coup d’etat in Honduras, did you see it as an isolated incident, or could such situations possibly reoccur?
Daniel Ortega: I believe that our nations cannot remain calm. The Honduran coup was a blow for all Latin American countries which, just a few weeks prior to that, had a meeting with President Obama in Trinidad and Tobago, where the latter proclaimed the beginning of new relations with Latin America. That coup meant a fight against intentions expressed in Trinidad and Tobago, not just against the Latin American people but against policy proclaimed by President Obama as well. If the US forces of reaction are capable of organizing and doing such a coup openly in front of their president, we cannot even talk about what would happen in the future. These forces are trying to establish their power in spite of suggestions and obligations taken by President Obama in relation to Latin American and Caribbean countries.
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Caribbean: Gender-Based Violence in Haiti
Tuesday, August 17 @ 07:35:51 AST |  By Stephen Lendman
August 17, 2010
The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) works with grassroots groups there, in America, and the Haitian Diaspora, developing effective human rights advocacy for some of the world's most oppressed, impoverished, and long-suffering people, over 500 years and counting.
In late July, it issued a new report titled, "Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape," a problem Amnesty International (AI) highlighted in March saying:
"Sexual violence is widely present in the camps where some of Haiti's most vulnerable live. It was already a major concern (pre-quake), but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks," the issue IJDH examined in its report, explaining that Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps "exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence," two US lawyer delegations and a women's health specialist investigating the problem firsthand in May and June, interviewing over 50 rape or attempted rape survivors.
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US War on Iran: Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan: Diplomacy of Brotherhood
Monday, August 16 @ 17:58:28 AST |  By Kourosh Ziabari
August 15, 2010
The trilateral summit of the presidents of three Persian-speaking countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan wrapped up on August 5 in Tehran and recorded another unforgettable event in the memory of the three brother nations. With innumerable cultural, religious, social, lingual and strategic commonalities, the three countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan have demonstrated their potentiality to build one of the strongest diplomatic partnerships in the region and benefit the world nations through a unique, fruitful and constructive cooperation.
The people of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, whose countries were parts of the Greater Persia in ancient times, consider Iran as their cultural homeland and believe that the Iranian nation is the inheritor of their paternal legacy, the Persian civilization.
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War and Terror: Bourj el-Barajneh: Searching for Meaning in a Refugee Camp
Friday, August 13 @ 09:25:52 AST |  By Ramzy Baroud – Beirut, Lebanon
August 13, 2010
Two young girls stood, as if frozen, starting below them at an ever vibrant Beirut. Their balcony, like the rest of their house and most of their refugee camp was of an indistinct color. It was dirty, as were their clothes. They, on the other hand, looked beautiful and bright, although their future didn’t.
Here in Bourj el-Barajneh, one of a dozen Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, time seems to have stood still for years. Generation after generation, children grow up in the same desperate reality, punished for crimes they did not commit, injured by a history not of their making. They stand on dirty balconies, cracked beyond repair, watching Beirut and the world go by.
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Invasion of Iraq: U.S. Troops Told To Return Fire Even When Civilians Present
Friday, August 13 @ 09:21:46 AST |  By Sherwood Ross
August 13, 2010
Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary. The massacre---that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them employed by Reuters News Service---ignited a wave of international revulsion against the U.S. military when a video of the massacre was released by WikiLeaks last April.
“What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire---a “wall of steel,” in Army parlance---even if it put civilians at risk,” report Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey in the August 16th issue of The Nation magazine.
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Latin America: Chavez-Santos Summit in Colombia: UNASUR-Brokered Peace Breaks Out
Thursday, August 12 @ 16:48:00 AST |  By Francisco Dominguez
Secretary Venezuela Solidarity Campaign
August 12, 2010
The already bad relations between Venezuela and Colombia took a turn for the worse after the accusations made by the outgoing Uribe government's OAS representative, Luis Hoyos, who charged the Venezuelan government with harbouring Colombian guerrillas (1,500) and allowing guerrilla camps (85) inside its territory. The "evidence" - which has been pretty discredited - for this batch of accusations - as with previous ones - also came from the eight 'magical laptops' seized by Colombian military forces in an illegal military attack in March 1, 2009.
Chavez reacted by breaking off relations with Colombia, leading to a further worsening of the relations between the two nations, but sent his foreign minister to attend Santos' inauguration anyway. Uribe's response was to announce that his government was lodging a formal accusation against Venezuela in the Inter-American Committee of Human Rights and another formal charge against President Chavez personally to the International Criminal Court, one day before Juan Manuel Santos inauguration. Furthermore, Uribe, reportedly, announced he would be prepared to testify to the ICC against Hugo Chavez.
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Invasion of Iraq: Who cares how many 'camel drivers' are being massacred in Iraq...?
Thursday, August 12 @ 16:46:39 AST |  Capitalist Education for Barbarism vs Human Emancipation in the Epoch of Globalization
By Franz J. T. Lee
August 12, 2010
Over the last decades, here in
Venezuela and elsewhere, we have learned the hard way that nothing that
capitalists and their loyal followers do or say is innocent or naive.
Somewhere there is always hidden a quid pro quo. Education in global
imperialism is not to liberate or to inform anybody about anything
human, humane or humanist, especially it is not to emancipate the
billions of 'speaking tools' (Aristotle), that is, not to enlighten the
modern, already by and large, docile, ignorant wage-slaves. Global
'correct', ruling class education, generated and controlled by the
'Hitlerite' think tanks, by the State, by the 'Ministry of Education'
that is, by the Orwellian 'Ministry of Love', massively aids in the
capitalist production, distribution, consumption and destruction of
wares; it helps to realize capital and super profits, but it also
serves ideologically to destroy natural and social resources in times
of social crisis or economic collapse, of open fascism.
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War and Terror: General Hypocrisy: Blood on Our Hands?
Monday, August 09 @ 19:31:59 AST |  By Ron Jacobs
August 9, 2010 - counterpunch.org
The hypocrisy is so obvious it's almost not worth mentioning, but when Admiral Mullen stated on July 28, 2010 that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may "have blood on his hands" because his organization leaked thousands of documents detailing US and NATO atrocities and coverups in Afghanistan I couldn't help but be astounded by Mullen's self-righteous attempt to shift the blame for the murderous debacle in Afghanistan away from the Pentagon and its civilian supporters. Only those who refuse to accept the connection between a doomed policy of Washington in Afghanistan and the soldiers sent to carry it out could deny that it is Mullen, his military cohorts and those who fund them who have blood on their hands, not Assange.
This lot includes Congress and Wall Street, and, unless we do something about it, the people of the United States. The politicians and the military have been given long enough to end the war and occupation of Afghanistan. Indeed, they have been given more than long enough, yet there is no progress. Even if one agrees with the supposed goal of creating some kind of client state in the country, they would have to agree that instead of progress the situation has worsened. For someone who never agreed with Washington's desire to prop up a cooperative regime in Afghanistan, the time to do something to end this war is way past due.
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Caribbean: Haiti’s Colonial Overlord
Friday, August 06 @ 14:39:11 AST | Clinton in Haiti
By Ashley Smith
August 06, 2010 - counterpunch.org
Amid the hoopla over Chelsea Clinton’s wedding at a posh estate north of New York City, there were plenty of toasts in the media to Bill Clinton and the good works he’s performed since leaving the White House.
In particular, Clinton’s role in working with Haiti, both before and after the catastrophic earthquake last January, was singled out.
To the U.S. media, Clinton is a compassionate statesmen, with only the best interests of the Haitian people at heart. Particularly since this year’s quake, he has been viewed as a decisive leader who can “get things done,” in contrast to the country’s ineffective government. Because of his role as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), Esquire magazine called Clinton “CEO of a leaderless nation,” the Miami Herald repeatedly refers to him as the “czar of the recovery effort.”
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World Focus: White Citizenship
Friday, August 06 @ 13:01:04 AST |  What "We Want Our Country Back" Really Means
By Margaret Kimberley
August 06, 2010 - blackagendareport.com
The founding fathers made one thing perfectly clear when they ratified the constitution in 1787. Full citizenship rights were meant only for white men of property. Over a period of nearly 200 years, people’s movements guaranteed that those rights were extended to everyone regardless of race or gender, but the fact that the struggle literally took centuries should not be forgotten. It is tempting to snicker at the sight of today’s Tea Party members, grown men wearing knee breeches and three-cornered hats. Yet their costumes tell an important tale. They evoke an era still seen as the high water mark of American society, the days of the enslavement of one race and the extermination of another. This movement has captured the Republican Party outright and leaves even some Democratic politicians and pundits in a state of fear and/or awe.
The pull of that early history is ever present for many white Americans. No matter the degree of progress made, the adherence to the evils of America’s early days are never far from the surface. Simply put, there are too many brown faces for the liking of a majority of white people. Even the president has a brown face. His very presence has been a shock to the country’s system and to the mythology which says that only white people are truly American.
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US War on Iran: Bombing Iran: Taking the World Down With Them
Friday, August 06 @ 12:41:20 AST | By William Blum
August 06, 2010 - killinghope.org
If and when the United States and Israel bomb Iran (marking the sixth country so blessed by Barack Obama) and this sad old world has a new daily horror show to look at on their TV sets, and we then discover that Iran was not actually building nuclear weapons after all, the American mainstream media and the benighted American mind will ask: "Why didn't they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?"
The same questions were asked about Iraq following the discovery that Saddam Hussein didn't in fact have any weapons of mass destruction. However, in actuality, before the US invasion Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. I'm reminded of this by the recent news report about Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq. Last week he told the British inquiry into the March 2003 invasion that those who were "100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out to have "less than zero percent knowledge" of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction. 1
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War and Terror: Afghanistan: a War Correspondent's Viewpoint
Friday, August 06 @ 12:32:11 AST | A Conversation with Anand Gopal
By Ron Jacobs
August 4, 2010 - counterpunch.org
Anand Gopal is a correspondent who has been covering the war in Afghanistan for several years. He has worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. He is currently working on a book about Afganistan. I met Gopal a couple of years ago and check in with him occasionally to get his viewpoint on the Washington-led occupation and war in South Asia. Most recently, I sent him a few few questions via email. The exchange follows.
--Ron Jacobs
Ron: If you were to compare the situation in Afghanistan in summer 2009 with the current situation, how would you characterize it? For example, is there more fighting or less? Has the nature of the insurgency changed? If so, how?
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War and Terror: Targeted Assassinations: Challenging US Policy
Thursday, August 05 @ 14:03:07 AST | By Stephen Lendman
August 05, 2010
The WikiLeaks "Afghan War Diaries" provided documented evidence of America's out-of-control lawlessness, including Special Forces death squads (Task Force 373) extrajudicially murdering or capturing suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda figures, many hundreds or perhaps thousands on a so-called Jpel (joint prioritized effects) list, also willfully killing civilian men, women and children, the London Times Kabul-based Jerome Starkey reporting earlier on these crimes, suppressed in US media accounts, presenting an embedded view of the war, omitting the targeting of Americans until then Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged it in February, explaining that:
CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads have been authorized to kill US citizens abroad, suspected of terrorist involvement, Blair saying:
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World Focus: What more does it take to waken the US workers from their state of self-denial?
Thursday, August 05 @ 14:01:16 AST | By Franz J. T. Lee
August 05, 2010
In the 'Project for a New American Century' and many other
military-strategic documents available for public insight on the
Internet, the elitist warlords of the military-industrial complex have
told the world what globalization, 'full spectrum dominance' and
'military humanism' are all about. Global think tanks like the 'Club of
Rome' and the de facto 'One
World Elite Parliament', better known as the 'Bilderberg Group', have
begun to disclose their ultimate purpose which is no less than the
construction of a 'One World Government'.
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