KABUL—Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces.  Even with details culled from news reports, these data can’t help but merge into one large statistic, something about terrible pain that’s [...]

Lethality Beyond the Pale In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But [...]

Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his [...]

En aquellos días todos escribían sobre Iraq, pero es sorprendente la poca atención que los estadounidenses, incluidos los periodistas, prestaban al sufrimiento de los iraquíes. Ahora Iraq vuelve a aparecer en las noticias. Se acumulan las palabras, los homenajes y las retrospectivas y de nuevo a nadie le importa el sufrimiento de los iraquíes. Por [...]

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in [...]

Sunni radicals hit Baghdad Tuesday morning on the anniversary of the beginning of the US war on Iraq, killing over 50 people in attacks on soft targets (shopkeepers, pedestrians) in Shiite areas of the capital. They were signaling their continued die-hard opposition to the new Iraq, which is dominated by Shiite political parties, in which [...]

“Bush May Be Gone, But “Psychosis” of U.S. Foreign Policy Prevails” On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the global justice activist and author Arundhati Roy joins us to discuss the war’s legacy. Roy is the author of many books, including “The God of Small Things,” “Walking with the Comrades,” [...]

Las dos guerras de EE.UU. han dejado cientos de toneladas de municiones de uranio empobrecido y otros desechos tóxicos FALUYA, Iraq. Se sospecha que la contaminación producida por las municiones de uranio empobrecido (UE) y otra polución relacionada con los militares ha causado un marcado aumento de defectos congénitos, casos de cáncer y otras enfermedades en [...]

On a plane circling Baghdad in gray dawn light, a little Iraqi girl quietly sang to herself in the next row. “When I start to wonder why I’m making this trip,” Sean Penn murmured to me, “I see that child and I remember what it’s about.”

Estuve en el tribunal militar de Fort Meade, Maryland, el jueves pasado cuando Bradley Manning admitió haber entregado documentos gubernamentales secretos a WikiLeaks. Los cientos de miles de documentos filtrados revelaban crímenes de guerra cometidos por EE.UU. en Irak y Afganistán al igual que actos gubernamentales antiéticos. La declaración de Manning ante el tribunal fue [...]