The Massive and Unseen Costs of America’s Post-9/11 Wars at Home and Abroad “I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were[Read More...]
The post Indirect Deaths appeared first on Countercurrents.
A Bidenesque Tour of America’s Regional and Global Military Adventures Hard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the U.S. war machine. He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America’s unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns. In terms of active U.S.[Read More...]
During his 1967 New York sermon, which made bold headlines in newspapers across the world, Martin Luther King cried out”A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” What would Rev. King say today about Americans bringing massive death and destruction to the innocent citizens and their children in Yemen, Syria,[Read More...]
“POWs Never Have A Nice Day.” That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North Vietnamese captors as the American war[Read More...]
“This is a different kind of war, which we will wage aggressively and methodically to disrupt and destroy terrorist activity,” President George W. Bush announced a little more than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. “Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated. Other victories will be clear to all.” This year will mark the[Read More...]
Apparently, the highest official of the US government owned by wealthy investors in war inadvertently let himself be overheard making an off-hand truthful remark that contradicts what the CIA overseen criminal media tells the world in excusing America’s genocidal crimes against humanity in Vietnam. Important is how criminal media seeks to ridicule someone saying something truthful about the the war it lied[Read More...]
I remember a long time ago, finding a Life (or Look) magazine at a swap meet in Arizona, on the outskirts of Tucson. Man, those were the days – 1977. Every sort of snow bird and desert rat out there swapping any number of a million things: from shrunken and powdered dog testicles (for the […]
The post Mask Up/Sink or Swim: Feedback Loops, Lag Times, Albedo Effects first appeared on Dissident Voice.
In choosing a title for his final, posthumously published book, the prominent public intellectual Tony Judt turned to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, published in 1770. Judt found his book’s title in the first words of this couplet: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates, and men decay A poignant sentiment but let me acknowledge that[Read More...]
It was the end of October 2001. Two friends, Max Elbaum and Bob Wing, had just dropped by. (Yes, children, believe it or not, people used to drop in on each other, maskless, once upon a time.) They had come to hang out with my partner Jan Adams and me. Among other things, Max wanted to get some instructions from fellow-runner Jan about taping his[Read More...]
Co-Written by William J. Astore and Danny Sjursen If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country’s catastrophic forever wars that, regardless of their deadly costs and lack of progress, never seem quite to end? Recently, in a podcast chat about our very different but somehow twin journeys through those wars,[Read More...]
