Tag: Sherwood Ross

Reportedly, under pressure from the Pentagon, President Obama “hesitated for more than a week” before he phoned Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari “to provide a qualified apology” for the November 26th killings by U.S. aircraft and artillery of two dozen Pakistani soldiers at a border post near Afghanistan.

The grim face of totalitarianism is emerging in the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) now before Congress.

Forecasting a future of robotic warfare in which perverted science is put at the service of its Empire, the U.S. has built 60 bases around the world for its unmanned, remotely controlled killer drone warplanes. And more bases are under construction.

Although America’s 25 million unemployed and underemployed could be a powerful force for social change, they aren’t combining in any effective way to protest, an eminent business authority writes.

The U.S. and Israel “now looked trapped together, weakened and dangerously isolated” during the Arab Spring over Israel’s intransigence on statehood for Palestine, an article in The New Yorker magazine charges.

Far from issuing the executive order he promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo, President Obama is keeping virtually all of its prisoners confined in limbo without trials.

The latest report by the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) is not likely to inspire politicians to shut down our private prisons when prison operators are pouring millions of dollars into their campaign coffers.

Terming Fukushima Japan's second massive nuclear disaster, novelist Haruki Murakami said this time no one dropped a bomb on us but instead we set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.

Of the 55-million families with mortgages, 10.4-million of them “are sliding toward failure and foreclosure”---a tragedy that will depress the U.S. housing market for years to come, a result of too many houses for sale and too few buyers.

Ten years have gone by since the terrible attacks on New York City and the Pentagon yet there is no closure on what happened on “9/11” and who was behind it.

It is hardly surprising that President Obama ordered the assassinations of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki since the last thing he wants is to bring any leader of al-Qaeda to trial.

Unless President Obama breathes life into a massive New Deal-type jobs and reconstruction effort, now, and not in some vague Tomorrow, his chances for re-election, will shrivel.

The best way for America to become more secure may well be to dismantle its vast security apparatus. This means eliminating the Department of Homeland Security, closing down our 800 military bases on foreign soil, and slashing armaments spending by the War Department, the one euphemistically called the Department of Defense but which is, in fact, the spearhead of today’s naked American aggression in six countries.

David Eisenhower, grandson of the president who warned Americans of a “military-industrial complex(MIC) 50 years ago, says in an essay this month that that coalition today “retains significant influence...” Yes, indeedy!

The $178 billion in cuts the Pentagon has proposed in its own budget “are largely illusory,” according to a report in the September 5th issue of “Bloomberg Business Week”(BBW) magazine.

Was President George W. Bush complicit in the 9/11 attacks? That’s a question that will not go away on this 10th anniversary of those terrible events.

The federal judge who socked the FBI with a bill for damages totaling $101.7-million for railroading five men to prison where they spent 20 years for a murder they didn’t commit has retired from the bench and looking about for new challenges.

Farmers along the banks of El Salvador’s Lempa River believe tomatoes gleam brighter than gold. They would rather put the river to work for farming, fishing, and drinking than to allow the multinational Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Co. of Canada use the river water to extract the rich veins of gold buried nearby---a process that involves applying toxic cyanide-laced water to separate gold from the surrounding rock.

Led by the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) the U.S. is stepping up its war in Somalia, The Nation magazine reports.

The news that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is seeking the Republican presidential nomination may well send a tremor through the Muslim world.

“Have we as a nation gone mad, waging war in the Persian Gulf while society crumbles?” Seymour Melman asked rhetorically when I interviewed him for The Progressive 19 years ago.

Federal agents from the FBI and CIA/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force tried to get a distinguished international lawyer to inform on his Arab and Muslim clients in violation of their Constitutional rights to attorney-client privilege, this reporter has learned. When the lawyer refused, he said the FBI placed him on a "terrorist watch list."

If the United States attempted to “conquer” by love rather than force of arms, it might be respected, not reviled, globally.

As America's empire spreads abroad, it becomes ever more the police state at home. The methods used for the suppression of foreigners by military force and violence are eventually mirrored in the “homeland.”

It's time to impeach President Obama and urge candidates who stand for peace to run in the upcoming presidential primaries.

As eavesdroppers go, next to Uncle Sam and John Bull, Rupert Murdoch, the moral force behind Fox News, is an amateur.

Nowhere in his discussion of how General David Petraeus will fare when he takes over the CIA in August does Washington Post columnist David Ignatius challenge the basic operation of the Agency itself.

Under President Barack Obama's new budget for fiscal year 2012, the Great American War Machine just rolls on and on. “As it is, we're pumping...money into sustaining a fighting force that's orders of magnitude larger than anything retained by any other country,” observes Ezra Klein of The Washington Post February 14th. So when Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that major cuts in military spending would be “catastrophic,” Obama settled for chopping $78 billion in cosmetic cuts Gates recommended over the next five years, Klein wrote, adding, “I bet there are more than a few Cabinet secretaries who wish they had that kind of power over the president's recommendations.” Some observers, by the way, think the Pentagon is, in fact, already running the show. Chalmers Johnson wrote in “Blowback”(Metropolitan/Owl) that the Pentagon is “close to being beyond civilian control; that it “more or less sets its own agenda” and that it “monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy.”

THE CIA, KKK, & USA By Sherwood Ross STAFF WRITER By assigning covert action roles to the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA), it is as if the White...

Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Reenactment Hiroshima      By Sherwood Ross    I am the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto A graduate of Emory College, Atlanta, Pastor of the Methodist Church of Hiroshima I was in...

 - "We don't torture," squawked George W. Bush time and again; he was lying. Murat Kurnaz in  Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man...

The solution to our fiscal crisis, The Nation magazine editorializes, is to “end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth.” That’s because nearly the entire deficit this year and those projected at least for the short term are the results of “the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession,” the publication says in its lead editorial of August 2nd.