Resources: Database War in Iraq
President Obama, on his first day in office, can make a number of changes that will mark a clean break with the Bush presidency. He can, and should, issue an executive order revoking any prior order that permits detainee mistreatment by any government agency. He should begin the process of closing Guantánamo, and he should submit to Congress a bill to end the use of military commissions, at least as presently constituted. Over the coming months he can pursue other reforms to restore respect for the Constitution, such as revising the Patriot Act, abolishing secret prisons and "extraordinary rendition," »
Interview With Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh: "The President Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing" By Charles Hawley and David Gordon Smith Der Spiegel Friday 28 September 2007 Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way in telling the story of what's really going on in Iraq and Iran. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke to him about America's Hitler, Bush's Vietnam, and how the US press failed the First Amendment. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. »
It's good that we're beginning to get all relaxed and comfy about genocide, isn't it? Samantha Power's important book on the subject was called A Problem From Hell. But in recent discourse, genocide seems to have become A Problem From Heck. One aspect of the shift is a new "realism" about genocide that reflects the way the world has come to tolerate it: We now tacitly concede that in practice, we can't or won't do much more than deplore it and learn to live with it. Another – more troubling – trend is toward what we might call "defining genocide »
July 29, 2007 Our War on Terror By SAMANTHA POWER The day after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush declared the strikes by Al Qaeda “more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.” Bush’s “war on terror” was “not a figure of speech,” he said. Rather, it was a defining framework. The war, Bush announced, would begin with Al Qaeda, but would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” The global war on terror, he said, was the “inescapable calling of our generation.” The phrase and the agenda that »
Behind the Phosphorus Clouds are War Crimes Within War Crimes We now know the US also used thermobaric weapons in its assault on Falluja, where up to 50,000 civilians remained by George Monbiot The media couldn't have made a bigger pig's ear of the white phosphorus story. So, before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones. There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed »
Use of Chemical in Iraq Ignites Debate Critics say civilians died in incendiary attacks. U.S. asserts white phosphorus was only used on insurgents. BAGHDAD Omar Ibrahim Abdullah went for a walk to get away from the heavy fighting in Fallouja a little over a year ago and, by his account, came across such a grotesque sight that he's been unable to banish it from his memory. The United States had mounted a full-scale offensive to pacify the rebel-controlled Iraqi city, and Abdullah said he was eager to escape the Askari district, where he lived. He walked south toward the »
Why Are We In Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?) By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF New York Times, September 7, 2003 In the back alleys of Iraq, the soldiers from the 101st Airborne and First Armored Divisions are hot, dirty and scared. They want to go home, but instead they're pinned down, fighting off hit-and-run attacks and trying to stop sabotage on pipelines, water mains and electric grids. They were told they would be greeted as liberators, but now, many months later, they are an army of occupation, trying to save the reputation of a president who never told them -- did he »
Samantha Power, Unpunishable The New Republic, December 2003 In a 1946 letter to Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt wrote of the impossibility of tailoring a judicial process to fit the Nazi horrors. "The Nazi crimes ... explode the limits of the law," the German philosopher (and then-exile) wrote her mentor. "[T]his guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems. ... We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue." Jaspers responded by chiding Arendt for »
Other Categories
9/11 and its aftermath (10)activism (2)
affirmative action (1)
AIDS (2)
anti-Muslim (4)
Anti-Semitism (7)
Armenian genocide (9)
Burma (4)
Bystanders (15)
Cambodian genocide (3)
Communism (1)
Congo (1)
Discrimination and admissions (4)
Eugenics (14)
fascism (1)
Genocide (4)
hate crimes (2)
hate crimes/hate speech (1)
Herero genocide (1)
Holocaust denial (3)
Human Rights (3)
Identity (1)
intervention (3)
Israeli-Palestinian conflict (3)
Judgment and reconciliation (2)
Nationalism (1)
Nazis, Hitler, and the Holocaust (15)
Nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry and war (3)
Nuremberg trials (1)
Obedience (5)
propaganda in the Nazi era (3)
race and education (6)
race relations in Boston (6)
Race, class, ethnicity, and stereotyping (49)
reconciliation (1)
red vs. blue state divide (1)
Rwandan genocide (8)
Sexual orientation and discrimination (3)
slavery (2)
Sudanese genocide (19)
torture (2)
Ukranian famine (1)
United Nations (3)
War and Violence (7)
War in Iraq (8)
World War I (2)
World War II in Asia (3)
Yugoslav genocide (6)