The CODEPINK Tribunal taking place December 1 and 2, and live streamed by The Real News, is a historic collection of testimonies about the lies and costs of the Iraq war. It takes on new meaning with the incoming Trump administration, and the hawks who are flocking to join that administration with their sights set on starting yet another war in the Middle East, this time in Iran.
In a nutshell, Murka continues to refine the art and science of blaming and punishing victims while rewarding perpetrators.
Murkin septionalism at its best !
And then, for the last 8 years, the Obama presidency continued to kill and destroy in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. We need a whole new system that supports the will of the people. Until then, refuse to fight their nasty wars, refuse to pay for them.
Thank you Medea for all you do. I think we will be less haunted by Bush’s Iraq lies, than the lies against Iran and potential war against Iran and its people.
We have near totally destroyed the entire Middle East and North Africa by our depraved “leaders” lies and wars and the only domino left to fall is Iran. If only there are some with the wit and morality to stop the madness…
Excellent article by Medea Benjamin.
" For speaking truth to power and confronting an illegal, immoral, war we were attacked viciously for being “unpatriotic” and treated like traitors."
Like Medea, millions of us tried to stop this illegal and immoral war based on a plethora of lies. but alas. to no avail, I knew then that America was not a democracy but a totalitarian regime using bogus WMD’s ( which were never found) as an excuse to protect the oligarch’s vested interests, in Iraq.
And it just corroborated that view when Obama failed to indict Bush for war crimes even though it would have been an open and shut case ( Bush even made jokes about not finding WMD’S in Iraq ) saying we need to look forward; NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
The content of Obama’s character rather than his skin color is far more important and relevant to the vast majority of people that despise him for so many very good reasons.
Your comment makes no sense, it is scattered, and provides zero evidence for claims and speculation or uses diversionary “facts” like: drones are 'surgical" and bombs “indiscriminate” - Obama is responsible for the sharp increase in impersonal drone warfare, the destruction of Libyan society, great expansion of the security state, and much more.
The content of Obama’s character ( to paraphrase Dr Kings great comment) shows clearly regarding his silence on Standing Rock Water protectors, water pollution health dangers in Flint, actually protecting the Arctic from drilling/pollution, police murders/executions of Black people, and a hundred other actions or failures to act during his tenure - Brother Malcolm and Martin were right…even given there is great racism in America and Canada and elsewhere, you sir, are constantly defending a person that does not deserve it, regardless his skin color - I wonder at your motives.
If you want to point the finger of blame, I offer two targets: First, Nancy Pelosi who prevented multiple impeachment bills against Bush to come to the floor for a vote. A vote to impeach would have exposed the whole lie concocted by the Bush-Cheney cabal and might have resulted in multiple indictments against that whole sorry bunch.
You can point another finger at Obama for his “let the past be past and let’s look to the future” bullshit.
This isn’t South Africa. There will be no Reconciliation Commission. This isn’t Nurenburg. There will be no criminal tribunals.
With much respect for Benjamin and her work, let us recall that Bush’s lies are far more likely to be more extensively contested under Trump than under Obama. In neither case does the challenge much come from the government carrying out the policies supported by Bush’s lies, but surely this does not have to be re-re-re-established.
In the days after the Trump election, there is an apparently very difficult truth for the left, center, Democratic, progressive, liberal, fellow-traveler, moderate, and kinda-sorta contingents to bite down on. That difference is still that what was the elected and appointed parts of the Obama contingent and the Clinton contingent or the elected Democratic contingent are still pro-war, pro-violence, globalist, anti-worker, and anti-democracy.
This is far less uniformly true of the majority of the voting base that elects these candidates, but it is no less true for that. As long as the rhetorical and polemic move to present Trump and his particular band of thieves as thoroughly apart from the machinations of the recent central Democratic party, the call for unity will remain ironically divisive even when presented by people with wonderful personal credibility, like Medea Benjamin.
In general, the problem with what people routinely call “apathy” has almost nothing to do with any genuine failure to care about the world that the so-called apathetic find around them. It rather that for whatever various reasons the promise of political action bears almost no credibility for the people so often called apathetic. it is a little hard to imagine that the sort of freak show that we have just passed through has to convince far more people that political action is inherently ineffective.
I would love to see some sort of argument presented that might successfully convey that there is a point of engagement here that can be successfully entered upon. I should think that doing so for most of us would absolutely have to involve actually responding to the debacle of the electoral system and the abandonment by the Democratic party of its one time working ideals and some level of useful response to that instead of simply moving on to Bush’s Iraq Lies as though these had been contested by the Democratic Party or the Federal Government or some related entity over the last eight years. I don’t mean in the least to presume to be the one to tell Medea Benjamin or Code Pink about all this, but at the same time, I am not and I do not think everyone else is apt to be willing to put the last eight years aside as though they did not happen.
According to Paul O’Neill, George Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Bush and Cheney started planning the Iraq War at their very first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001, fully seven months before 9/11. See “The Price of Loyalty” by Ron Suskind, pages 70-86. It was to be a “demonstration model” of U.S. military might. Bush ended the second NCS meeting saying, “Fine. Go find me a way to do this.”
I sawFahrenheit 9/11and Rumsfeld was more interested in going to war with Iraq than Afghanistan after the terrorist acts on that day. Bush convinced him to go to war with Afghanistan even though he was thinking about war with Iraq before that day. Two years later, Bush said Iraq was behind 9/11 and had plans to threaten world peace with WMD’s and said Iraq was as powerful as Japan and Germany were in WWII. Ehud Bara©k Obama lied about the reasons for bombing Libya as Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq.
Obama said Gaddafi was committing genocide against his people. Libya had an internal problem and did nothing to other nations including the ones that bombed them.
One should not forget Tony Bliar (Lord Bliar of Basra I believe) who went out of his way to promote the invasion of Iraq, and lied to Parliament despite about 80-90% of the British population being opposed to the war.
One could not blame Iran for acquiring nuclear weapons, given the decade of threats made by the USA. China has serious investments in Iran and one would expect the Russians not to want another country on its border being destabilised, as was the Ukraine. However, I doubt if that will stop the present fools in the White House; it was bad enough in the 1960s when there were reasonably sane fools working there.
It seems we are beset by a host of cascading critical issues, injustice, actions of political evil and repression, and environmental degradation/catastrophe and exploitation; it’s a wonder we can think and feel or focus at all. Some use this cacophony of political, social, economic and endless war reality as smokescreen for their own often narrow agenda, and none more continual or effectively than the forces of extremist Zionism and its racist agenda of ethnic cleansing, masked in a cloak of “religion” to distort ordinary (and extraordinary) theft of territory by force of arms.
The case can be made that Israeli/Zionist aggression and exceptionalist expansionism, coupled with the overt subversion of US foreign policy and domestic politics, has been at the heart of the endless “conflict” and near total destruction of the ME/NA traditional Muslim culture. The elevation of Donald Trump from pathological huckster to a position of real political power to further encourage and support Israeli crimes against humanity (as well as US) especially vis a vis Iran, is reason to fear for the future of the entire world.
Here is a case in point, reflecting and demonstrating the extremist, racist, Israeli MO and mindset over the past half century and probable future, expanding territory by force and fomenting further cultural, religious, and societal destruction’s to continue masking their true and pre-mediated intentions - always of course with the support and collusion of US political traitors and sycophants, including our endless ME wars - more than enough to “haunt” us…
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/12/a-major-setback-for-the-middle-east-peace-process/
Yes, there must be a People united resistance, and rebellion from the grassroots up, against the fascist imperialist amerikan empire! Then the Power will be great, and the rulers will be thrown out!
Thanks for your comment, experience and vision - your input/perspective will be very welcome at CD - here is another link to a site that also publishes alternative views and news you may not be aware of. Peace.
Anyone reading Gerard Menuhin’s book, “Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil” will know why the wars are ongoing and will not end short of Divine intervention. The controlled media will spew propaganda until the goals of the deep state are met.
I have always been curious to wonder why the USA considered it necessary to protect Europe with a nuclear “umbrella”. Just who was the threat? And just why is such “protection” still needed when there are two nuclear powers, excluding Russia, in Europe?
NATO is not necessary. The 2 nuclear powers in Europe besides Russia are Britain and France. If they spent more on their own militaries, they could merge their militaries with the rest of Europe and shut down US bases there. They could have done that even before the Cold War ended.
I have always been of the opinion that after WW2 the USSR had got all it wanted and that the threat of a Red Army invasion was negligible in the latter 1940s, even less than negligible in the 1950s and would and could never occur in the 1960s and thereafter as simply trying to control a bunch of angry Europeans, two of them with nukes, would be too much bother. After all, the USSR pulled out of northernmost Norway, Finland and Austria between 1945 and 1954 as had been agreed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin and subverted only those countries which had been traditionally open to scrapping with and periodiocally invading Russia during the previous few hundred years i.e Poland, the Baltic States and bits of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had fought with the Nazis, such as Roumania. As for what was East Germany; that’s life; if one goes about invading places, committing genocide and loses, don’t expect sympathy from the invaded when they come back at one.
The Cold War in Europe was probably totally unnecessary and had the USA collaborated with the USSR in the late 1950s and 1960s we could be on Mars by now. That’s the pity of it all.
