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6 Shocking Ways Capitalism Is Failing Working America

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Les Leopold - Feb. 01 (News Analysis) - Capitalism is coming apart at the seams and the middle-class is paying the price.

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Iraqis Voice Outrage as Haditha Massacre Trial Ends In No Jail Time for Accused U.S. Marines

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 26 (News Report) - The last of the U.S. marines charged in the 2005 Haditha massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, received no jail time after he pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty and avoiding charges of involuntary manslaughter. Under his sentencing, Wuterich now faces a maximum penalty of a demotion to the rank of private. The victims, including women and children, were killed when the marines burst into their homes and shot them dead in their nightclothes. Wuterich allegedly led the Haditha massacre and was the last defendant to face charges. Six other marines have had their charges dropped or dismissed, while another soldier was acquitted. "[Iraqi] outrage is perfectly understandable," says Tim McGirk, the Time magazine reporter who broke the story on the Haditha massacre. "Here is a case where so many Iraqis were killed, women and children, old men, and yet, what's happened? Most of the charges have been dismissed, and Wuterich was basically given a slap on the wrist." [includes rush transcript]

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Western Oil Firms Remain as US Exits Iraq

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Dahr Jamail - Jan. 09 (News Report) - hile the US military has formally ended its occupation of Iraq, some of the largest western oil companies, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, remain. On November 27, 38 months after Royal Dutch Shell announced its pursuit of a massive gas deal in southern Iraq, the oil giant had its contract signed for a $17bn flared gas deal. Three days later, the US-based energy firm Emerson submitted a bid for a contract to operate at Iraq's giant Zubair oil field, which reportedly holds some eight million barrels of oil.

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Police: Iraq War Veteran Suspected Of Killing Park Ranger Found Dead

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - Jan. 03 (News Report) - A plane searching the remote wilderness for Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, on Monday discovered his body lying partially submerged in an icy, snowy mountain creek with snow banks standing several feet high on either side.

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Iraqi Women's Activist Rebuffs U.S. Claims of a Freer Iraq: "This Is Not a Democratic Country"

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 16 (News Report) - Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, joins us to discuss the impact of the nearly nine-year U.S. occupation, particularly on Iraqi women. "The Iraqi cities are now much more destroyed than they were five years ago," Mohammed says. "At the same time, we have turned to a society of 99 percent poor and 1 percent rich due to the policies that were imposed in Iraq." Moahmmed decries the repression of Iraqi protesters that joined the Arab Spring in a February 25th action. "The women are the biggest losers in all of this. We went to the Iraqi squares, we demonstrated, but got oppressed in ways that are new to Iraqi people. Anti-riot police of the American style was something that we witnessed there ... This is not a democratic country." [Rush transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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The Costs of War: Tens of Thousands Dead, Billions Spent, and a Country Torn Apart

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 16 (Special Report) - Over the past nine years, the U.S. invasion and occupation has left a bloody toll on Iraqi civilians and foreign troops. Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops died, and another 32,000 were wounded. An accurate toll of Iraqis killed may never be known. Iraq Body Count says at least 104,000 Iraqi civilians have died, while some studies put have put the death toll at over one million. We speak to Catherine Lutz, Brown University professor and co-director of the "Costs of War" research project at the Watson Institute for International Studies. "The costs have really been staggering," Lutz says. "We know that Congress appropriated $800 billion over the years for the Iraq War. But the true costs, of course, go much farther than that, starting with the people of Iraq, who have lost lives in the hundreds of thousands." [includes rush transcript]

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U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq: "In Terms of Destroying Iraq, It's 'Mission Accomplished'"

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 16 (News Analysis) - The U.S. military may be leaving Iraq, but the U.S. government is not. The U.S. embassy in Baghdad is the largest in the world, and thousands of private contractors will fill the role of the departing U.S. troops. We begin our coverage of the U.S. withdrawal with Sami Rasouli, the founder and director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, who joins us from the city of Najaf. Invoking George W. Bush's infamous declaration after the fall of Baghdad, Rasouli says, "In terms of destroying Iraq, it's really 'mission accomplished.'" [includes rush transcript]

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Ron Paul: 9/11 Prompted "Glee" in Bush Administration

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Brian Montopoli - Dec. 10 (News Report) - epublican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Thursday evening that Bush administration officials were gleeful after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because it gave them a pretext to invade Iraq. "Just think of what happened after 9/11. Immediately before there was any assessment there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq," the Texas Republican told a group of mostly young backers in Iowa. He went on to suggest officials are now setting the stage for an invasion of Iran.

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Fact-check: South Carolina Debate

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson, Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley - Nov. 13 (Fact Check) - We found several exaggerations and misstatements in the latest Republican presidential candidates’ debate. Romney issued a hollow threat to take China’s currency manipulation to a world body that doesn’t actually deal with overvalued money, and he claimed federal spending consumes more of the nation’s economic output than it really does. … More >>

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How Washington Creates Global Instability

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Nick Turse - Sep. 19 (News Analysis) - It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.” It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them -- from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia -- Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.

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Violence Spikes in Iraq as U.S. Considers Ways to Extend Occupation Past December Deadline

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Aug. 19 (News Report) - Today, roughly 46,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, along with more than 64,000 private contractors. This week, as Iraq suffers its deadliest violence of the year, there is increasing speculation that the Obama administration will extend its occupation of the war-ravaged nation. Earlier this month, the Iraqi government authorized talks on whether to approve keeping thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq beyond a withdrawal deadline of December 31.

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What Does Lowballing the Number of Dead Iraqi Civilians Tell Us About Ourselves?

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Russ Wellen - Jul. 25 (News Analysis) - Over a period of about two weeks in May, I encountered in major news media three separate references to the number of people who had died in the Iraq war. Anderson Cooper, on his CNN show, Steven Lee Myers in the New York Times Magazine and Brian MacQuarrie in the Boston Globe all pegged the number in the tens of thousands, sometimes adding “at least.” . . . The “tens of thousands” mantra is peculiar because even the most conservative calculation—that provided by Iraq Body Count, a British NGO—is now more than 100,000.

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Mixed Signals on US Troops in Iraq

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Gareth Porter - Jul. 16 (News Analysis) - Anti-American Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has stood in the way of proposals to extend U.S. troop presence in Iraq beyond the end of this year, and some of his backers have attacked American forces as a reminder of the looming deadline. But Gareth Porter reported for Inter Press Service that Sadr may be sending mixed signals.

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PTSD Affecting U.S. Soldiers More Than British

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Michael Scott Moore - Jun. 23 (Research) - Combat stress is still a murky and sometimes taboo element of soldiering, but one of the strangest discoveries is that the strain isn’t evenly spread among vets from different countries. For example: A far higher percentage of American soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than British soldiers do.

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Former CIA Agent Glenn Carle Reveals Bush Admin Effort to Smear War Critic Juan Cole

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 22 (News Report) - Former top CIA counterterrorism officer Glenn Carle has revealed the Bush administration sought damaging personal information on Juan Cole, an academic and prominent critic of the Iraq war, in an attempt to discredit him. Carle says the Bush White House made at least two requests for intelligence about Cole, whose blog "Informed Comment" rose to prominence after the Iraq invasion. Carle refused to carry out the request. In a joint interview, Carle and Cole join us to discuss the explosive revelation and why Cole is now calling for a congressional investigation. "I think I was targeted because this was a propagandistic administration … full of people who thought they could pull the wool over the American people’s eyes," says Cole.

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Read It and Weep: The Depressing and Expensive Legacy Of Empire's Hubris In Iraq

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Peter Van Buren - Jun. 08 (News Analysis) - After all, as of October 1, 2011, full responsibility for the U.S. presence in Iraq will officially be transferred from the military to the Department of State. In other words, as Washington imagines it, the occupation won’t really end at all, even if the landlords are switched. And the State Department hasn’t exactly been thinking small when it comes to its future “footprint” on Iraqi soil. The U.S. mission in Baghdad remains the world’s largest embassy, built on a tract of land about the size of the Vatican and visible from space. It cost just $736 million to build -- or was it $1 billion, depending on how you count the post-construction upgrades and fixes?

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The Mosaic Philosophy at Gitmo

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Apr. 30 (News Report) - Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

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A Professional Military and the Privatization of Warfare

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Jeff Shear - Apr. 22 (Special Report) - The antics of private military contractors are increasingly known, and they're the ones taking over for departing uniformed American troops in Iraq.

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Palast ArrestedBusted by BP in Azerbaijan

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Greg Palast - By Greg Palast - Dec. 20 (Investigative Report) - Here in Azerbaijan we believe in human rights. PLEASE GIVE US YOUR FILM." Oh, no, no, not good. The enforcers here come in three colors: the military police still wearing their old Russian puke-green uniforms, the MSN (the dictator's secret police) in windbreakers without ID, and BP's own corporate police force in black tunics, sashes and full hats who look like toy soldiers from the Nutcracker ballet. They weren't dancing.

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VIDEO: Police Arrest 131 Antiwar Protesters In Front Of White House

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Dec. 17 (News) - Hoping to spark the country's silent majority into action, antiwar protesters took to the streets Thursday, in one of the larger acts of civil disobedience in front of the White House in some time.

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Greener Battlefields Would Be Safer for Troops - Miller-McCune.com

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By John Perlin - Oct. 28 (Special Report) - So the Marine became a staunch supporter of energy efficiency and renewables, like solar and wind, to reduce the demand for oil at forward bases such as those in Al Anbar. In turn, he urged efforts to “reduce the frequency of logistics convoys on the road,” the general wrote to the Pentagon in a top-priority note, and thereby lessening the danger “to our Marines, soldiers and sailors.” A 2009 Department of the Army study reported one allied casualty in Afghanistan for every 24 convoys.

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WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on Iraq War Logs, "Tabloid Journalism" and Why WikiLeaks is "Under Siege"

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Oct. 26 (Special Report) - In an extended interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discusses the release of nearly 400,000 classified US military records on the war in Iraq, the biggest intelligence leak in US history. The disclosure provides a trove of new evidence on the number of civilian casualties, violence, torture, and suffering that has befallen Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. While the Obama administration is defending the US military's record in Iraq, the allegations in the documents have sparked worldwide condemnation. Assange also confirmed that threats by Pentagon would not stop WikiLeaks from releasing additional military documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

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WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs Expose U.S.-Backed Iraqi Torture, 15,000 More Civilian Deaths, and Contractors Run Amok

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Oct. 25 (News Analysis) - To help analyze the documents, we hold a round table discussion with three guests, including David Leigh, the investigations editor at The Guardian newspaper of London, and investigative journalists Pratap Chatterjee and Nir Rosen.

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Army Suicide Report Ignores Suicide-Producing Drugs

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Dissident Voice - By Martha Rosenberg - Oct. 24 (Special Report) - Why are troops killing themselves? The long awaited Army report, “Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention” considers the economy, the stress of nine years of war, family dislocations, repeated moves, repeated deployments, troops’ risk-taking personalities, waived entrance standards and many aspects of Army culture. What it barely considers are the suicide-inked antidepressants, antipsychotics and antiseizure drugs whose use exactly parallels the increase in US troop suicides since 2005.

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WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs: Iraqi Deaths Higher Than U.S. Count

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Oct. 23 (News Analysis) - Military documents laid bare in the biggest leak of secret information in U.S. history suggest that far more Iraqis died than previously acknowledged during the years of sectarian bloodletting and criminal violence unleashed by the 2003 U.S.

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