Archive 1986 – 2017

The most comprehensive documentation of Hillary Clinton’s systematic support for military action and of her deceptive talk, if not lies. From The Cairo Review of Global Affairs

By Jan Oberg Was it just a group of amateurish military people who believed that they knew how to make a coup? Was the brain behind it a 75 year old Islamic leader or ’guru’ Fatullah Gülen sitting in Pennsylvania and remote controlling the whole affair through his followers in Turkey? Was it perhaps the U.S.? State Department and CIA – who were tired of President Erdogan’s unpredictability and policies vis-a-vis Russia and ISIS? Many more or less realistic and conspiracy-like theories have emerged since it happened about a week ago. I have no particular expertise on Turkey and no access to intelligence data but I guess it is reasonable to think of this coup having been master-minded by Erdogan and the people around him and/or that he had early warnings about it but let it happen – which fits with his words that it was a gift from God....

The Incirlik air base in southeast Turkey- from which U.S. pilots launch bombing raids on ISIS forces in Syria – is home to about 50 B-61 hydrogen bombs. That makes it NATO’s largest nuclear storage facility. Each bomb has a yield of up to 170 kilotons, nearly a dozen times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. The bombs are stored in underground vaults within aircraft shelters that in turn are protected by a security perimeter. Last week Incirlik was in the headlines because it appears it was one of the command centres of the attempted coup, meant to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the coup had been put down the commander of Incirlik was arrested and charged with complicity in the overthrow attempt. Jonathan Marshall in Consortium News, who has been researching this year the inner workings of the base, reports, “The security of the bombs is...

Commenting on PressTv on July 22, 2016 after yet another tragedy in the Mediterranean. But how much did the media cover that in comparison with the Nice tragedy – and Hollande’s killing of 120 innocent civilians as revenge for Nice (which at the time was not known to have any connections to ISIS or similar)?

A night before the attempted coup of July 15th, in conversation with an elegant secular business leader and permacologist in the seaside town of Yalikavak I was surprised by the intensity of her negativity toward the government, expressed with beguiling charm. She insisted that Turkey had hit rock bottom, that things in the country could not get worse. I felt speechless to respond to such sentiments that struck me as so out of touch with the reality of Turkey. This woman lives in a beautiful, secluded country house nearby, enjoys an extraordinarily successful career, is associated with a prominent Turkish family, possesses an engaging personality by any measure, and from all appearances lives a harmonious and satisfying modern life of comfort, good works, and human security. And yet she is totally alienated by the Turkish experience of Erdoğan’s prolonged leadership, which she alternatively describes as ‘autocratic’ and ‘Islamic.’ I mention...

/07/19/475897/horror-Nice”>Iranian PressTV (July 19, 2016) some 11 minutes into this program. “The War On Terror is history’s most stupid and counterproductive. If the terrorism problem has increased about 80 times since 2001 we should be intellectual and decent enough to ask ourselves: What are we doing wrong? Nobody asks this question and it will end us up in hell.”

By Jonathan Power The crime of aggression (“planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”) was described by the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. President George W. Bush and British prime minister, Tony Blair, have been accused by many as war criminals for starting the war against Iraq and, second, for not watching carefully enough to make sure that war crimes carried out by individual soldiers were not covered up, and for the torture that Bush initiated and Blair appeared to tolerate. Did Blair lie over the reason for going to war with Iraq – the supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It depends how you define lie. If you define lie as saying this cat is black when in...

This article is a short version of a text which was first published with the title “Nonviolent Conflict Escalation” in Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 2016. DOI: 10.1002/crq.21173. In this longer article you can find references to all our sources. ”We have mapped all the conflicts in the world” a senior researcher at PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo) told one of the authors at a seminar a couple of weeks ago. If that was true, it would be pretty impressive. Each of the seven billion people living on earth at the moment are likely to have a considerably number of conflicts every year with their partners, neighbours, friends and family members. However, the large majority of these conflicts are dealt with in a peaceful and creative manner. Although they can feel burdensome in the heat of the moment, many of them are a way for people to grow as persons and learn...

By Gunnar Westberg After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on the 11th of September 2001 President George W. Bush felt the need for revenge. Since years back, the US had developed plans to attack Iraq. Its dictator Saddam Hussein had been left in power after the First Gulf War in 1991, a war which the father of George W. Bush had left unfinished. The real reasons for this renewed war on Iraq are not known. Saddam Hussein had previously had a program to produce nuclear weapons. After thorough investigations lead by the UN representatives Rolf Ekéus and Hans Blix it became clear that all weapons of mass destruction had been eliminated. There were no nuclear weapons. However, Saddam Hussein could of course start the production of nuclear weapons at some point in the future. And the US leaders choose to disregard the reports by...

By David Krieger July 7 , 2016 The International Court of Justice (“Court,” or “ICJ”), the world’s highest court, issued its Advisory Opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons on July 8, 1996. Thus, this week marks the 20th anniversary of that momentous opinion. The Court found in a split vote (7 to 7), with the casting vote of the Court’s president Mohammed Bedjaoui deciding the matter, that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be illegal under international law. The Court could not determine whether it would be legal or illegal to threaten or use nuclear weapons “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” Three of the judges voting to oppose general illegality, however, were concerned with the word “generally” and wanted the Court to go further and remove any ambiguity...

PRESIDENTIAL VISIT


 The President went to Hiroshima,
 the place of the first atomic attack.
 He carried his heart in an old knapsack.

 He went where no sitting president
 ever ventured before, journeyed
 through time to a long ago war.

 He stood at the very place where death 
 fell from the sky, where the mushroom cloud 
 sucked up the earth, rose higher than high.

 His words poured forth like a passionate poem,
 a poem filled with power, as he placed 
 a white wreath on a sea of white foam.

 He bowed before the city’s eternal flame,
 cried out for a world deeply in pain,
 swore we must not let it happen again.

 We must choose our vantage point well,
 above the bomb or beneath, On one side 
is hubris, on the other is grief.


 David Krieger 
June 2016