On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said: Reports that say that something hasn’t […]
The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching. Five decades on, the political classes in […]
With the advent of a new Kennedy running for president, new life was given to JFK’s World Peace speech on June 10, 1963, both among some progressives, and even the LaRouche Schiller Institute. Their thesis is that Kennedy was planning on making peace with the Soviet Union and was going to withdraw US troops from […]
Nicholas Schou interviews Douglas Valentine about his new book, Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, published in May of this year by Trine Day. Listen To This Story Introduction by Nicholas Schou: In the early 1990s, when the US began to normalize relations with Vietnam, Douglas Valentine, then a young author and historian of […]
Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam. The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to […]
Daniel Ellsberg marches in the San Francisco Pride Parade to free whistleblower Chelsea Manning, June 29, 2014 (Photo by R.D. Harris) Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, fighting to the end to warn of the existential threat of nuclear war. The 92-year-old whistleblower left a legacy of peace activism dating to his courageous release of […]
Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. — Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002) If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen. The list of butcheries […]
In Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, Douglas Valentine descends into some of the most sinister aspects of US foreign policy. These include drug running, illegal arms sales, bribery, human and artifact trafficking, far right coups, assassinations, agitprop and disinformation, as well as fiefdoms set up by former CIA and their assets that are […]
What if someone of consequence and world attention, difficult for US monopolized and controlled media to ignore, reminded us that one year before receiving a bullet to his brain, King had made bold print headlines in newspapers worldwide reading, “KING CALLS US “GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD.1 Would it not weaken US deep […]
In my decades of doing what I do, I’ve encountered so many folks patently unwilling to accept that their beloved Land of the Free™ is capable of the horrendous criminality it openly perpetrates as policy. (Such a cultic mindset, of course, is partly responsible for such blind trust vis-a-vis the “pandemic.”) With all this in […]
