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POPSOpium, Rape and the American Way
Truth from the women in Afghanistan: (read the whole article for the real story) "In eight years less than 2,000 Talib have been killed and more than 8,000 innocent civilians has been killed," she went on. "We believe that this is not war on terror. This is war on innocent civilians. Look at the massacres carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Look what they did in May in the Farah province, where more than 150 civilians were killed, most of them women and children. They used white phosphorus and cluster bombs. There were 200 civilians on 9th of September killed in the Kunduz province, again most of them women and children. You can see the Web site of professor Marc Herold, this democratic man, to know better the war crimes in Afghanistan imposed on our people. The United States and NATO eight years ago occupied my country under the banner of woman's rights and democracy. But they have only pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They put into power men who are photocopies o
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POPSIs Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? What has happened to the Geneva Conventions? This omission of screening on capture - which has applied at Bagram ever since - came about because, under instructions from the highest levels of government, the military was obliged to shelve its plans to hold competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, despite the fact that they had been pioneered by the US, and had been used successfully in every war from Vietnam onwards. Held close to the time and place of capture, these tribunals (as opposed to the CSRTs, which mockingly echoed them), comprise three military officers, and were designed to separate combatants from civilians seized in the fog of war, in cases where it is not obvious that prisoners are combatants (when they are not wearing a uniform, for example), by allowing the men in question to call witnesses. During the first Gulf War, around 1,200 of these tribunals were held, and in nearly three-quarters of the case, the men were found to have been wrongly
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POPSEight Years Later: Speak Out Against the War in Afghanistan I remember the day after 9-11 when I was talking to a group of friends in Rehab about it--they (all supposedly reasonable people) all wanted to go to war and I was alone in saying that going to war would solve NOTHING. So, who was right? 'Mericans first response to any crisis seems to be violence of some kind and I'm SICK OF IT. So speak out, don't hold back, fellow Americans!!!
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POPSWhite House Browbeats Dem Freshmen On War Money: "You'll Never Hear From Us Again" "This is politics, you know, there's a lot of pressure put on members," he said. "But from what I can see, people are concerned that when they go back home, they're going to have to explain why they voted for the war if their constituency's opposed to it. People who have consistently opposed the war are going to have difficulty explaining why they switched."
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POPSMilitary Recruiters to Capitalize on Air Show, 'Senior Week' odoco I hope that members of the Iraq Veterans Against the War show up and do a bit of 'recruiting' of their own at this event. The ultimate question is this: "If you enlist, what are you really fighting for? Who are you really serving? Who really profits from your service?" American empire / Wealthy elite who rarely serve themselves / Corporate interests. I am a veteran, but I firmly believe the US military has become so corrupted and controlled by corporate interests that it no longer serves a true national security purpose - unless you believe that the 'national interests' and 'empire building' are one and the same. me :fuckin' vultures...no truth in their advertising!
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POPSEXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Air Raid Victim Tells Obama to Leave Afghanistan We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat. We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl's face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.
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POPSGoodbye, GM ...by Michael Moore MM knows of which he writes 1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated. We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million dagger
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POPSHoward Zinn's "Three Holy Wars" As a Conscientious Objector, I'm often asked if I would fight in a "good war" or a "just war" and after some deep soul searching I would have to say NO. Howard Zinn gives words to SOME of my contemplations about this dilemma. And then there were the very surreal hypothetical questions asked by those old white men on my draft board--"Would you defend your sister if she was being raped?" Of course I would, you old asshole, I just wouldn't KILL the rapist and I certainly won't go 8,000 miles to fight a war and kill people who never threatened my sister, dumbfuck!
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POPSBrutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama Since taking office, Obama has: 1. Reconstituted the Military Commissions. 2. Denied detainees Constitutional and Geneva Conventions protections. 3. Praised torturers and murderers as dedicated public servants and vowed to violate US law to protect them from prosecution. 4. Expanded Bush's State Secrets legal theory. 5. Continued illegally spying on Americans. 6. Continued to use USAPATRIOT Act powers and not called for repeal. 7. Retained Gates as Secretary of Defense despite his tainted record. 8. Promoted General MacChrystal to commander in Afghanistan despite his tainted record. 9. Continued contracts with abusive, fraudulent private contractors. 10. Concealed evidence of war crimes. 11. Increased illegal attacks on Pakistan. 12. Increased drone attacks, with a horrific civilian death and injury rate, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. 13. Not banned white phosphorus or cluster munitions. 14. Escalated the Afghan war. 15. Adopted Bush's Iraq war plan. 16. Threatene
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POPSObama's Middle East Imperialism Also morally questionable is the extension of the Afghanistan war into Pakistan, a bitter pill to swallow for those who once sincerely believed in Obama’s antiwar rhetoric. The house appropriations committee recently approved $2.3 billion in “emergency spending” for “assistance” to Pakistan, most of it for the purpose of making war: training Pakistani “counterinsurgency” forces and police and building a fortified U.S. super embassy. In an attempt to fool the American public about Pakistan, Obama has substituted the always-unpopular ground troops with unmanned drones, stepping up the use of this highly inaccurate form of combat since becoming President and consequently killing hundreds of civilians. Obama has also laid down the law for his puppet presidents in Afghanistan and Pakistan: they will fight his war to the end or be replaced. The recent scene in Washington of these two Presidents declaring “unity and cooperation” with Obama’s war plans was perhaps the most farcical imper
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POPSThe Cheney Bullshit is beginning to clear up Olbermann is on to the truth about the lead up to the war and how Cheney's psychotic torture obsession caused the USA to enter the war in Iraq. The guy should be hung by his feet on the Whitehouse lawn.
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POPSDemocracy at Gunpoint Guarantees U.S. Defeat The implication of what the Taliban says is simple and convincing: that it will be impossible for the U.S. and NATO to win a war in Afghanistan in which the enemy is based on the other side of what is for them an easily permeable frontier between Afghanistan and the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, but which is for American and NATO forces politically impregnable. This is classical guerrilla warfare against regular forces. The guerrillas operate with (in this case) almost perfect intelligence concerning NATO troops. They are highly mobile and reactive, and possess a refuge where they are vulnerable only to attack by rocket-firing drone (unmanned) aircraft, since the main, ground-based NATO/U.S. forces cannot reach them. The Pakistan government and army forbid American and NATO intrusion into their country. The United States in the past has scarcely been a scrupulous observer of foreign sovereignties, and the Bush administration declared its policy commitment to aggressive and
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POPSSupport War Resisters! The wars rage on, despite the MSM ignoring them and the killing will just get worse in the coming months. All men of conscience, whether they came to it now or before deserve our support.
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POPS'The War Is Not a Game:' Gold Star Families Speak Out Expresses Outrage at Video Game "Just as Sony abandoned plans to launch a video game called Shock & Awe in 2003, Konami Atomic games should cancel their plans to release 'Six Days in Fallujah' before they instill more thoughtless pain on anyone" GSFSO member Joanna Polisena, sister of Army Staff Sergeant Edward Carman, Killed in Action in Iraq on April 17, 2004 added "When our loved one's 'health meter' dropped to '0', they didn't get to 'retry' the mission. When they took a bullet, they didn't just get to pick up a health pack and keep 'playing'...they suffered, they cried, they died. We - their parents, siblings, spouses, children and friends - absolutely find it disgusting and repulsive that those so far detached (and clinging to denial of reality) find it so easy to poke fun at such a thing." Joan Maymi, whose nephew, Captain Ernesto Manuel Blanco-Caldas, was Killed in Action in Iraq on December 28, 2003 said, "Unless you have suffered the death of loved one like we have, or are caring for the ones who have
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POPSGive Obama a Chance to Do What? Well worth reading more--some of young Mr.Gostola's pts: When one says give Obama a chance, it means allowing climate change, mountaintop removal mining, environmental racism, and an addiction to oil, coal, nuclear power continues unchallenged. It means further political manipulation of science so corporations can make profit at the expense of Mother Earth and the biological material which populates it. When one says give Obama a chance, it means ICE raids. It means government secrecy and lack of transparency. It means a vicious erosion of civil liberties and constitutional rights continues. When one says give Obama a chance, it means there will be one more online town hall meeting where the legalization of marijuana is a top question and it means that one more town hall meeting will be another time when Obama scoffs and patronizes tens of thousands of Americans. It means the war on drugs continues. When one says give Obama a chance, it means our nation’s “pay or die” health
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POPSObama's Triple Surge Into Afghanistan What Obama has not mentioned is that, in addition to soldiers and civilians, there is a third surge in his plan: private military contractors. Yes, another privatized army, such as the one in Iraq. There, the Halliburtons, Blackwaters and other war profiteers ran rampant, shortchanging our troops, ripping off taxpayers, killing civilians and doing deep damage to America's good name. Already, there are 71,000 private contractors operating in Afghanistan, and many more are preparing to deploy as Pentagon spending ramps up for Obama's war. The military is now offering new contracts to security firms to provide armed employees (aka, mercenaries) to guard U.S. bases and convoys. Despite the widespread contractor abuses in Iraq, Pentagon chief Robert Gates defends the ongoing privatization push: "The use of contractor security personnel is vital to supporting the forward-operating bases in certain parts of the country," he declared in a February letter to the Senate Armed Services Committ
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POPSWhy Are We Still at War? "This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced," Norman Mailer wrote in his book "Why Are We at War?" six years ago. "It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void..." Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: "This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. ... There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist."
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POPSThe True Death Toll of the Iraq War Unfortunately, the masses of ‘Merikan sheeple will never understand this or even be aware of it…but thanks for posting and I’ll pass it on…some of us actually DO CARE!
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POPS"The so-called good war" The Obamans started their PR campaign long ago and now it just sonds normal, right? Nazi propagandist Goebbels said, "Tell a big lie often enough and it becomes the truth"...which is what what the war in Afghanistan is becoming...more airstrikes on civilians and propaganda about saving the Afghans from the Taliban.
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