'A torrent of ghastly revelations': what military service taught me about America
Training on a base in California, and later serving in Afghanistan, made me confront the reality of American empire, and the injustice that pervades society at home. MY FIRST AND ONLY WAR TOUR took place in Afghanistan in 2010. I was a marine lieutenant then, a signals intelligence officer tasked with leading a platoon-size element of eighty to ninety men, spread across an area of operations the size of my home state of Connecticut, in the interception and exploitation of enemy communications. That was the official job description, anyway. The yearlong reality consisted of a tangle of rearguard management and frontline supervision. Years before Helmand Province, Afghanistan, however, there was Twentynine Palms, California. From the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, I was trained as a lance corporal in my military occupational specialty of tactical data systems administration (a specialty I would later jettison after earning my officer commission in Quantico, Virginia, in 2008). My schoolhouse was the Marine Corps Communication-Electronics School, which was abbreviated as MCCES, pronounced “mick-sess.” For many, the wider location became “Twentynine Stumps” or “the Stumps.” But for me it just became “the Palms.”
“Alexa, Drop a Bomb”: Amazon Wants in on US Warfare
Amazon is seeking to build a global “brain” for the Pentagon called JEDI, a weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created.
Founded in 1994 as an online book seller, Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer, with more than 300 million customers worldwide, and net sales of $178 billion in 2017.
Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the aforementioned “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars acronym — JEDI.
MILITARY RECRUITERS, GET THE HELL AWAY
This week, Lyle Rubin, a former Marine who was sent to Afghanistan, will visit high schools and college classes in New York City as part of World Can’t Wait’s We Are Not Your Soldiers program. In this small but important way, we are intervening with students who are in danger of signing up with the U.S. military.
We are grateful to those of you who have supported this project which brings veterans into high school and college classes to speak to students about their real experiences in the US military occupying other countries. We look forward to your continued support and the support of others to bring this program to more students throughout New York City and to grow it so that it can reach out to students around the country.
Please help us spread the word
- Like and share our Facebook page
- Donate for advertising to reach educators in other states. We are prepared to go anywhere, physically or virtually, to any school that invites us in to address its students.
What Will It Take to Save the Children of Yemen?
I sifted through the children’s backpacks laid at the Isaiah Wall, across from the United Nations, looking for one labeled with the name of an 11 year-old boy. That’s the age of my son, and carrying it would help me feel closer to the lives we were mourning. I found one.
Abd al-llah Abdullah Hussein al-Raza, along with 39 other school children, was killed in a Saudi airstrike on August 9, 2018, in Yemen’s Saada province. They were traveling on a celebratory end-of-year field trip when a bomb hit their bus, killing eleven adults as well as the children. The United States supplied the bomb, manufactured by Lockheed Martin. In press photos, heaps of the children’s bloodied, blue backpacks anchored the grotesque tableau of a massacre.
It should not have taken the murder of school children to at last focus the world’s attention on the war that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates having been waging on Yemen since March 2015. Merciless bombardments, the sealing of ports, disease, mass starvation, and the suffering of children have been its hallmarks. Since the war’s start, more than 85,000 children under the age of five may have died from hunger alone. Any purported justification of the war as a means to thwart Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels has vaporized long ago in this ferocious depravity.
No Shortage of Party Cowards; We Need Heroes In the Streets
"Not everybody was enamored with the show of solidarity between Trump and Newsom " while the Camp Fire raged, posted Andrew Sheeler to thetribunenews.com. Last weeks' photo session in Paradise, California was nothing short of shameful in terms of missed opportunity to challenge the Climate-Change-Denier-in-Chief face to face. "In the bitter reality of the fires, what you saw from [governor-elect] Newsom and [Governor] Brown is the claim that a little cash and aid from the Feds is reason to unite with Trump and the implication that in this there is some totally illusory victory for the people," concluded Refuse Fascism organizer Barry Thornton. "We need to step outside the framework of normal politics and build a mass movement of millions to drive out the regime."
Broad-Daylight Fascism Is Impossible to Ignore
"We have come to it at last," writes Truthout editor William Rivers Pitt. "The moment too many have been whistling past in the ill-placed hope that everything would fix itself has arrived. The Achilles heel of democracy -- the use of the democratic process to install a government bent on dismantling democracy -- has been pierced with deliberation and intent. It is everywhere now, and all of us are involved.
Honduras Exodus: A Crisis for Trump's 'Manifest Destiny'
This caravan is not "seeking the American dream" but "fleeing the Honduras nightmare," says Jari Dixon, an opposition politician in Honduras.
Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" is a 21st century fascist program of Manifest Destiny - "America First" - wrapped in the flag and Mike Pence's Bible taken literally, with a program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia. -- Refuse Fascism 2018 Call to Action
Fascists In the White House: It's Up to Us to Drive Them Out
No matter who wins the midterm elections, Trump and Pence retain power. That is an unacceptable reality for millions of disenfranchised Americans and exploited subjects around the world. In the Name of Humanity, the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
"Even with a 'best-case' scenario of Democratic wins, where do you truly expect us to be on the morning of November 7th?" asks Refuse Fascism volunteer Sarah Roark. "Other than more or less where we are now, only with less time on the clock?"
Fascism can come to power through the normal processes of elections and laws, but it cannot be removed from power in that way, says RefuseFascism.org. For nearly two years, the Trump/Pence regime has maneuvered through one shocking crime against the people after another, burying each under yet another monstrous offense. Refuse Fascism has indicted the regime in seven exhaustive lists. But there is a way to stop the Trump/Pence program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia.
“WE ARE NOT YOUR SOLDIERS” WANTS TO VISIT YOU
World Can’t Wait’s We Are Not Your Soldiers project is starting its twelfth year of visits to high schools and college classes with recent veterans of U.S. wars of terror. We are now beginning to schedule our class visits for the fall semester.
With the Trump/Pence Regime envisioning and engaging in even more militaristic engagements and gearing up to expand those wars to additional countries via both traditional and drone warfare (as well as nuclear threats), it is more important than ever to go in to speak to students who are largely unaware of what’s happening internationally.
In the Name of Protecting Civilians, U.S. Certifies Escalating War Crimes in Yemen
“I certified to Congress yesterday that the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure resulting from military operations of these governments.”
—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, September 12
The Trump/Pence regime’s “certification” that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were reducing “harm to civilians” is worse than a sham. And so was its claim to be working to “allow unimpeded access” for humanitarian relief and taking actions to lessen the war’s catastrophic impact on Yemeni civilians.
Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Lobbied for Appointment of John Yoo to 9th Circuit Court
The Trump nominee for U.S. Supreme Court believed the author of notorious memos providing legal cover for those torturing human beings would be great as a lifetime pick for Ninth Circuit, reports Common Dreams staff writer Julia Conley on confidential emails released by Senator Cory Booker. The exchanges between Kavanaugh and Kyle Sampson occurred one day after the date of one of Yoo's torture memo drafts tweets journalist Mike Sacks:
Kavanaugh referred to Yoo as his "magic bullet." Interpret that as you will, but I see this exchange as Kavanaugh's wanting to load up the judiciary with originalist, Unitary Executive folk; and as circumstantial evidence that Yoo knew the potential blowback for the torture memo.
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