security

By David Krieger The Nuclear Zero lawsuits, initiated by the Marshall Islands, are about the law, but they are about much more than the law. They are also about saving humanity from its most destructive capabilities. They are about saving humanity from itself and about preserving civilization for future generations. They are incredibly important, and I will try to place them in a broader context. I will begin by sharing two quotations with you. The first is by Jayantha Dhanapala, a Sri Lankan diplomat, former United Nations Under-Secretary General, and long-time and committed leader in the area of nuclear disarmament. He states: “The spectre of the use of a nuclear weapon through political intent, cyber-attack or by accident, by a nation state or by a non-state actor, is more real than we, in our cocoons of complacency, choose to acknowledge.” The spectre of nuclear use, even nuclear war, is real...

By Gunnar Westberg A memory: Russia as a candidate for NATO membership Members of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW, have for many years regularly visited the NATO Headquarters in Brussels. We also had good contacts with Russian military officers and Foreign Office politicians. In the middle of the nineties members of NATO’s commission on Nuclear Weapons asked if we could arrange a meeting in Moscow, “because we meet the Russians only under very formal circumstances”. Some open discussions over the vodka were hoped for. We arranged the meeting and got a group of leading Russian military brass and politicians on the participant list. But NATO hesitated. We were told they could not afford the trip… Finally only one officer, a Canadian, came from Brussels. So there we were with a group of disappointed Russian officers. The NATO representative in Moscow showed up for a couple of...

  American Sniper was released on Christmas Day, 2014. It is a movie version of Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, with 255 kills, 160 officially confirmed by the Department of Defense. The movie set in Iraq is directed by Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper plays the part of Chris Kyle, and Sienna Miller is brilliantly cast in the role of his wife, Taya. American Sniper is a fictionalized movie version of the war stories associated with Chris Kyle’s experience as a Navy SEAL in the Iraq War as recounted in his best-selling memoir. The film can be viewed from a variety of angles, including even as one more indictment of war as hell. A second line of interpretation focuses on the intense psychological tensions experienced by this single American soldier and his comrades caught up in the horrors of urban...

Considering the year that is about to end is a time to pause long enough to take stock of what went wrong. In the United States not much went right aside from Barack Obama’s surprising initiative to normalize relations with Cuba after more than 60 years of hostile and punitive interaction. Although the sleazy logic of domestic politics kept this remnant of the worst features of Cold War diplomacy in being for a couple of extra decades, it is still worth celebrating Obama’s move, which when compared to the rest of his record, seems bold and courageous. As well, Obama exhibited a strong commitment to doing more than previously on climate change, using his executive authority to circumvent Congressional unwillingness to act responsibly. Obama’s immigration reform proposals also seem on balance to be positive, although whether they will be implemented remains an open question. Drifting Toward Cold War II: Remembering...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> It is John McCain, a former Vietnam warrior and the Republican candidate for president when Barack Obama first won the presidency, who has conducted a long campaign against the US using torture. Last week when the US Senate’s study of the torture used during the Administration of George W. Bush was published he has been one of the very few voices of the right to welcome it. When the allies won the Second World War the torture of the Nazi regime’s top military commanders was not allowed, even though the detained had plenty of information on who did what. Few argued that torture was necessary to elicit the information required in order to prosecute the Nazi leadership at the Nuremberg war crimes trial (although Churchill had argued earlier that they didn’t deserve a trial and they should be put against a wall and summarily shot). It was conventional interrogation...

This petition will be delivered to the U.S. government, the International Criminal Court, the President of the UN General Assembly, the President of the Human Rights Council and the European Court of Justice. Petition initiated by two former UN Assistant Secretaries-General, UN Humanitarian Coordinators for Iraq: Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday. On 9 December 2014, the US Senate released its CIA torture report. The investigation confirmed what globally has been known for many years: the US Central Intelligence Agency and US-outsourced national authorities in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere have been involved in an extensive range of torture applications. Compelling evidence has become available, especially since 2001, the beginning of the Afghanistan war, through investigations by the European Parliament and national judicial authorities, as well as two major reports presented by Swiss Senator Dick Marty in 2006 and 2007 to the Council of Europe, on secret CIA detention...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Tehran Dec 9, 2014 The First Conference on ”World Against Violence and Extremism” is inaugurated here in Tehran this morning by President Rouhani. His idea was endorsed unanimously by the UN General Assembly last year. This PressInfo was written before I came to Iran. The last round of negotiations between Iran and the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council + Germany about the future possibility that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons should have resulted in no agreement but a 7 months postponement. It is a waste of everybody’s time in one of the most urgent issues on the international agenda. An a-symmetric conflict Here are 5 countries bristling with thousands of nuclear weapons themselves and planning to spend trillions of dollars on more and more sophisticated nukes – unanimous in telling a country that does not have nukes to not acquire them: ”What we can’t live without...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Just before former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday made his stunning criticism of the West that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to said the West had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it as it did in Germany after the Second World War). Gorbachev has long been the West’s pet political darling, (although the New York Times didn’t report this speech) – for undoing the straitjacket that enveloped Soviet society, for allowing the reunification of Germany and for being the major contributor to ending the Cold War. So the question is will the West listen to him now? Will it listen to his point that the expansion of NATO has made Russia feel threatened? Will it understand that there is a good reason why he and an overwhelming majority of Russians...

Protestant Liechtenstein recently held a conference on making banking shariah compatible, to attract capital from Muslim countries. And no doubt also because the big survivors of the 2008 crisis were China and Muslim countries; China because the focus is not only growth but lifting the bottom up – increasing domestic demand and less dependence on trade in 1991-2004 – Muslim countries because of Islamic banking. A common Western misunderstanding is that Islam forbids interest; what is forbidden are relations that are only monetary; they should be economic, social, more human, in a broad sense. Just to make money available against interest is out. Purely financial deals selling and buying financial objects–derivatives at any level–for commissions are also out. Banks and other companies have to be in it together. There is more to it. A bank has to be trustworthy, not at the brink of collapse. A leading Islamic banker in...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> October 28th 2014 A soon-to-be released report of the US Senate criticizes the CIA under President George W. Bush of conducting torture of Al Qaeda suspects. However, it doesn’t assess the responsibility of Bush himself nor his vice president, Dick Cheney. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, the 6,000 page report is “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the US.” The report shows that the CIA did not provide accurate information to Congress and also provided misleading information. The report also concludes that the CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. While the report was being prepared the CIA penetrated the Senate Committee’s computers, arousing the fury of its members. Bush and Cheney were deeply involved in initiating the torture program.

It should never have come to this horrible situation in Ukraine. The local population of Donetsk, Lugansk, Slavyansk and other eastern Ukrainian cities is living through a true nightmare. Residential areas are being bombed, shelled and burned. Non-combatants i.e. elder, women and children are lying dead in the streets. We’re talking about thousands of deaths. No water supply, no heating, no security – this is the grim reality for the population. 700.000 Eastern Ukrainians have already escaped from the war scene, most of them are living in refugee camps in Russia. It is worth noting that they have not fled to Kiev or elsewhere to the west. Surprisingly the Western media hardly pay any attention to the horrors in Eastern Ukraine. But that is not all. Ukraine is in total disruption socially, politically and not least economically and financially. Furthermore, the mental scars in Ukraine will continue for at least...

to tell the world that we must stop denying, stop taking huge risks and stop wasting incomprehensibly large sums so much needed for human welfare instead. A nuclear-free world is eminently possible. And better. The nuclear states are committed to it through the Non-Proliferation Treaty and countless statements and UN resolutions. But they deny their responsibility. There’s been enough documented technical and human failures with nuclear weapons. We ought to be scared. Most media shed light on potential nuclear weapons, those Iran for instance don’t have. That’s the proliferation problem. But non-existing nukes can’t kill everything we love. Existing nukes can. That’s the problem of possession. And then there is state terrorism. Remember, until 9/11 nuclear arsenals were part of the ‘balance of terror’? Terrorism is the deliberate wounding or killing of innocent people to achieve a political purpose and to instill fear. No nuclear weapon can be used without...