Archive 1986 – 2017

On September 11, 2001, nineteen men turned 4 commercial airplanes with passengers into weapons of terror attacking cities in the US, killing more than 3,000 people. “That crystal blue morning,” Craig R. Whitney wrote in the introduction to The 9/11 Investigation (2004), “changed the world, shocking the United States into realizing that it had been drawn into a global war with brutal suddenness.” The US attacked Afghanistan to root out “Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime”, and then went into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, claiming that his regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, among other things. The Taliban were ousted, Saddam Hussein arrested, and no weapon of mass destruction were found in Iraq, yet “the larger war and the terrorist threat to the American homeland continued unabated.” In a way, all this is because at the time of the horrible attack, the US was, and presently continues to be, “led by...

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LONDON – A ‘no’ to Turkey starting negotiations to enter the European Union on October 3rd “will have centuries of implications”, as one influential academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it to me last week. It would push a wounded Turkey back into the arms of the nationalists, even perhaps the hard line fundamentalists, and be grist to the mill of those who argue that the Christian Western world will always consider itself superior and apart from the Muslim one. It would, as the provost of Istanbul’s Bahcesehir university, Eser Karakas, told me, make clear that Europe has no interest in becoming the great power that Turkey could help make it with its large population and army, able to play an influential role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and not being subordinated always to the policies of the U.S.. Yet if there are no good reasons for a...

Yet this tragedy only foreshadows much worse future catastrophes if the world continues on its current course. Tricycle and helmet found 1,500 m from hypocenter Hiroshima Memorial Museum © Jan Oberg 2004   The trappings of nuclearism As long as the big powers insist on maintaining nuclear weapons, claiming they need them to protect their security, they cannot expect to prevent other countries and terrorist organizations from acquiring such weapons–and some day using them. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed over 200,000 people.Today’s nuclear bombs are vastly more powerful. If even one nuclear device had been detonated in a parked car or a boat on the Thames, the Center of London would be strewn with smoking, radioactive rubble and over a million people might have been killed outright, and scores more would die slowly from radiation disease. The double standard, “Nuclear weapons are good for us, but bad for...

LONDON – While Europeans debate their economic sclerosis and the Americans their growing deficits most of the rest of the world is moving forward and upward, especially so if we are talking about numbers of people not of countries. Every time I come to Turkey I have to blink. Not that long ago the big cities were overridden with shantytowns and poverty stalked every village. Now, if not truly European as the Turks so earnestly want, the country makes a good attempt at emulating European standards- few shanty towns, fast roads all over the place, handsome bridges, well dressed children, a fast rising growth rate, a highly successful manufacturing export sector, rapidly improving heath and educational services and a remarkably obvious presence of educated woman in positions of responsibility. But Turkey, while an exception in the Middle Eastern Muslim world in that it both lacks oil and distributes the wealth it...

David Ray GriffinDet Nye Pearl HarborForuroligende spørgsmål om Bush-administrationen og 11. september320 sider, paperbackForlaget Progressive PublishingUdgivet på dansk i august 2005ISBN: 87-91560-02-0Normalpris 160 danske kroner Se under artiklen hvorledes du kan anskaffe bogen – også på tilbud. David Ray Griffin, amerikansk professor i religionsfilosofi, har skrevet en bog, der er bemærkelsesværdig på mere end én måde. I forordet gør TFF-Associerede Richard Falk opmærksom på det bemærkelsesværdige i, at de mange uafhængige undersøgelser – kritiske til den officielle udlægning af terrorangrebet d.11.september 2001, – som Griffins bog dokumenterer, har kunnet undholdes offentlig spredning. “Det vil ganske sikkert forandre vores opfattelse af, hvordan den konstitutionelle demokrati fungerer på De Forenede Staters højeste ledelsesniveau. Der fremstår et billede af verdenshistoriens magtfuldeste stat i dyb krise hvad angår politisk legitimitet”. Indvidere skriver Richard Falk: “Hvis Det Nye Pearl Harbor fik den folkelige opmærksomhed og den mediebevogenhed den fortjener, så ville den i grunden forandre den offentlige debat og positivt påvirke fremtiden....

LONDON – In Washington and other Western capitals there is a view gaining ground that a popularly elected government in the Middle East is better than a shaky autocratic client. Maybe there is some element of truth in this. Yet there is still a marked reservation about going the extra mile and accepting that a free and open poll might bring Islamist parties to power. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said a few measured things about the need for next week’s Egyptian presidential election not to be a forgone conclusion but the U.S. is hardly keeping the pressure on, presumably fearing an opening will be exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood with its “secret agenda”. We have still not come far enough from the 1990 elections in Algeria when France, the former colonial master, and the U.S., ignored the fact that the Islamists had clearly won a majority and...

LONDON – The statistics had arrived on the Swedish prime minister’s desk that morning, his first day back at work after his summer vacation, cycling around the villages near his summer estate. It was good news. Gorän Persson, now in his ninth year of office, told me that the growth rate for this year will be near 3% and next year more than 3% – enough, he said, to maintain Sweden’s trajectory of the last decade which was “above the average for the European Union” and, in particular, “as good as the Anglo-Saxons, Britain and the U.S.” (Although he admitted that for the U.S. he was referring to per capita growth, so as to discount the effect of its fast population growth due to rapid immigration.) This begged the first question- how does this self-confessed socialist state do it? What is the secret for success when Swedish taxes are the...

Först Hans Levanders rapport från resan till Pyongyang med kollegan Gunnar Westberg. Sedan Westbergs öppna brev till USA:s utrikesminister Condoleezza Rice och hans reflektioner över nödvändigheten av att hjälpa Nordkoreas folk. Efter deltagande i IPPNW:s regionala konferens i Hiroshima 20&endash;21 augusti 2005 fortsatte Gunnar Westberg och undertecknad Hans Levander till Pyongyang, huvudstaden i Nordkorea. Vi mellanlandade först i Beijing där vi sammanstrålade med två läkare Lars Pohlmeier och Stephan Kolb samt en medicinstudent Lena Selig samtliga från vår tyska systerorganisation. Vi fem flög den 23 augusti från Beijing till Pyongyang dit vi var inbjudna av den nordkoreanska IPPNW-föreningen Korean Anti Nuke Peace Physicians, KANPP. Ankomsten Vi tog oss således med flyg från Beijing till Pyongyang, ett nordkoreanskt flyg som går denna sträcka två gånger per vecka. Med på planet var personer som arbetar med internationellt bistånd, diplomater, en del representanter från Nordkorea vilka vi kände igen då de alla bär...

* Dansk oversættelse under den engelske tekst A couple of weeks ago the leading media of the West and the Muslim world made the 10th anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica their top story. Sweden’s television prime time news program devoted 18 minutes to it out of 30 – not one minute of research behind. CNN, BBC and all the rest made it a top story, high-level people flocked to Srebrenica. Today, on August 5, it is 10 years ago Croatia and the United States committed war crimes in Operation Storm. No one remembers, there isn’t one article on CNN, BBC or other leading media. At the time this U.S. /Clinton-assisted ethnic cleansing of about 250.000 legitimate Croatian citizens of Serb origin by the Croat Army from Croatia was the largest ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia. It has only been surpassed by that of Serbs from Kosovo (proportionately) in 1999 which was...

LONDON – We are all, left and right, pro war and anti war, frozen in the headlights of Iraq. Even many of those who campaigned vigorously against the war are frightened to be bold and say the troops should come out. Anarchy is the state of political disarray we have long been acculturated to fear. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote Yeats. To walk away is the height of irresponsibility. But is it? An insurgency working in its home terrain enjoys advantages that are just as formidable as any precision-guided weaponry that soldiers of the coalition can deploy. The insurgents may not have ground down the American and British troops but they have certainly created enough mayhem to instil sufficient fear in every Iraqi and expatriate workman so that the economy remains almost where years of sanctions and two aerial bombardments left...

On August 6 & 9, 2005 It is 60 years ago Fight nuclearism, the ultimate terror ! PressInfo 225, July 26, 2005The Real Threat is Nuclear TerrorismThe tragedy of the terrorist bombs in London only foreshadows much worse future catastrophes if the world continues on its current course. But there are four things we can do to secure the survival of humankind without nuclear weapons. “It is much more realistic to get rid of all nuclear weapons than waiting until they are used, whether deliberately or by accident,” says Dietrich Fischer in this PressInfo that leads up to the 60th Anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. TFF PressInfo 147 from 2002Can we learn to live without the bomb?The, perhaps provocative, thesis of this analysis is that we have:a) underestimated the human, psychological, existential and cultural-cosmological aspects of the nuclear age;b) we have worked far...