January 29, 2013| News | John Glaser

After 13 failed appeals, a Guatemalan court on Monday ordered 86-year-old former US-backed dictator Efrain Rios Montt to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

“Prosecutors allege Rios Montt, who ruled as commander-in-chief for 17 months, turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson against leftist insurgents and targeted indigenous people during a ‘scorched earth’ military offensive that killed at least 1,771 members of the Ixil tribe,” Reuters reports.

Rios Montt wasn’t the only one turning a “blind eye.” He came to power in a military coup and “was a close ally of Washington who received training at the infamous “School of the Americas,” writes Cyril Mychalejko. The Reagan administration…

not only covered up, but aided and abetted war crimes and genocide in Guatemala. For example, President Reagan traveled to Guatemala in December 1982 to declare that Rios Montt was getting a “bum rap”, while praising the dictator’s “progressive efforts” and dedication to democracy and social justice. Just a few days after Reagan’s presidential visit the Guatemalan military massacred 251 men, women and children in Las Dos Erres.

The United States was party to an extensive list of human rights violations and possible crimes against humanity going back to the Eisenhower administration, when in 1954 the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

The 1960-96 conflict in Guatemala, with consistent US intervention on the side of the government and paramilitary groups, saw some 200,000 people, predominantly indigenous Mayan, murdered or disappeared. The height of the bloodshed occurred under US ally and beneficiary Ríos Montt, during which the number of killings and disappearances reached more than 3,000 per month.

Montt’s forces, with the help of his chief of staff Fuentes, slit the throats of women and children, beat innocent civilians and doused them in gasoline to be burned alive, tortured, and mutilated thousands of innocent indigenous peasants. The UN commission investigating the atrocities has already concluded it constituted acts of genocide.

Montt may finally face trial. No one has dared to suggest that those in Washington who supported, and were complicit in, his crimes ought to face similar justice.

10 Comments

January 28, 2013| News | John Glaser

Did Israeli government officials aggressively promote an unsubstantiated story about an explosion at an Iranian nuclear facility?

According to Ali Gharib at The Daily Beast, yes. He writes that it is “an object lesson that shows just how far some press—and even Israeli government officials—have gone down the rabbit hole on Iran issues by propagating a story reported on a conspiracy website.”

Reports have been circulating for days claiming there was such an explosion at the Iranian enrichment facility at Fordow. It might have just disappeared, but Israeli officials started pushing the story in the press, without citing any evidence, of course.

Gharib explains:

The story first popped up three days ago on WND, written by an author going by the pseudonym Reza Kahlili who claims to be a former CIA spy in Iran. But Kahlili is unreliable, to say the least: among other outlandish claims peddled by Kahlili, he wrote that Iran already has nuclear weapons. But that didn’t stop all kinds of news media repeating Kahlili’s unsubstantiated claim. The website of the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronot ran a story on Saturday that began, “WND, an American news website affiliated with the Right, reported Friday that a mysterious explosion has destroyed a significant portion of Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility.” (If I was on the right, I’d be angry about the claim that my political beliefs are “affiliated” with WND.) On Sunday, the Jewish Press ran a story riddled with punctuation errors that cited WND and Yedioth, reprinting parts of the latter’s story in full. And another story today at the Jewish Press, under a credulous headline, admitted the story might not be right in its lede.

…What was surprising was that Israeli government officials would publicly comment on such a story. But that’s exactly what happened when a top national security adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to take the report at face value. Responding to an inquiry from the Times of Israel, Homefront Defense Minister Avi Dichter—the acting defense minister at the time—said, “Any explosion in Iran that doesn’t hurt people but hurts its assets is welcome.” That’s all fine and dandy, except that it propagates a potentially false story from an unsavory source. Rather more amazingly, Israeli intelligence sources confirmed to the Times of London that the story was real.

Not only did the Iranian government immediately deny the unsubstantiated reports, but now the US government has come out to deny them too. ”We have no information to confirm the allegations in the report and we do not believe the report is credible,” Carney said. “We don’t believe those are credible reports.”

This shows how eager some Israeli government officials are to peddle untruths they know to be false in their endless quest to legitimate a war of aggression on Iran for a nuclear weapons program it doesn’t even have.

22 Comments

January 28, 2013| News | James Bovard

Equality For African Children

“Won’t you give up your ‘assault weapon’ so that poor African children won’t have to do without? After all, shouldn’t African children have the same right to kill for U.S. interests as American women?”

This cartoon & caption courtesy of Tom Blanton, the mastermind of the Project for a New American Revolution, who does some of the best political art around. Check out his other antiwar work at his Flickr page.

4 Comments

January 27, 2013| Iran, News | Angela Keaton

From Frank Brodhead of Concerned Families of Westchester:

As President Obama puts his new national security team into place, the likelihood is increasing that no meaningful negotiations about Iran’s nuclear policy will take place before Iran’s presidential election in June. There are several reasons to think this. During his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry gave no indication that President Obama’s policy towards Iran was deviating from “all options are on the table,” and there is no indication that the administration was about to relax its (to Iran, unacceptable) negotiating position. Second, as noted in some articles linked below, it is becoming clear that, in separate talks between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran is not about to allow an inspection of its military base at Parchin (an IAEA demand) until a more comprehensive negotiating framework is developed in the parallel negotiations between Iran and the P5+1.

If there are no negotiations between the Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany), there is little likelihood that sanctions against Iran will be lessened. I’ve linked essays below about the recently augmented sanctions, with several essays stressing the terrible effect that the sanctions are having on supplies of medicine, and thus health.
Continue

6 Comments

January 27, 2013| Barack Obama, Civil liberties, Covert Action, Dictatorship, Obama, Pakistan, War at Home, War on Terror | L. Reichard White

Could he [Mr. Obama] order the targeted killing of an American citizen [cleric Anwar al-Awlaki], in a country with which the United States was not at war [Yemen], in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.

Mr. Obama gave his approval… Secret Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles – NYTimes.com

Yep, judge, jury and executioner.

That used to un-American, not to mention illegal — AND a really bad idea. What happened?

11 Comments

January 25, 2013| News, Week in Review | Angela Keaton

IN THIS ISSUE

  • Top News
  • Opinion and analysis

This week’s top news:

Kerry: US Will Do What We Mustto Stop Iran: Senator John Kerry (D-MA) vowed in his Senate confirmation hearings to be the next Secretary of State that the US would do what we must; to stop Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon, adding that the clock is ticking; for Iran to comply with US demands.

US, West Chasing Non-Threats in Africa: As the France-led military intervention in Mali enters its second week, a growing chorus of Western governments, from Britain to the US, are voicing strong support for it by systematically exaggerating the threat posed by militants in Africa’s Sahel region.

Continue

No Comments

« Previous Entries

Next Entries »