Peace and Security
Game Time for New START
After 20 hearings and more than four months of debate, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is gearing up to vote on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed in April.
read moreA Gentler Name for Psychic Warfare
Adopting an alias has also been tried as a public relations strategy by corporations that find themselves struck with an image problem. Most recently, this deception has been employed by Blackwater, the infamous government contractor involved in so many nefarious deeds that it now disguises itself with an inscrutable new moniker: Xe. Fittingly, Xe is the abbreviation for xenon, a chemical defined as a colorless gaseous element.
read moreRebranding the Iraq War
The war in Iraq is over. Or so the government and most media outlets will claim on September 1, by which time thousands of U.S. troops will have departed the land of two rivers for other assignments. With this phase of the drawdown, says President Barack Obama, “America’s combat mission will end.” The Pentagon is marking the occasion by changing the name of the Iraq deployment from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn.
read moreAnother Curse for Afghanistan
As if war, tyranny, drugs, corruption, disease and misogyny weren’t misfortune enough for Afghanistan, now the Pentagon reports that it also suffers that worst affliction of all–mineral resources.
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U.S. Military Aid to Colombia Violates Human Rights Law
A “false positive” diagnosis causes relief when it means earlier signs of cancer were wrong. In Colombia, a “falso positivo” deepens grief, for it means the suspicion that a murdered youth belonged to the guerrilla forces was a mistake. Usually, the murderer likely knew that already.
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Cocaine Trade
The Lessons of WikiLeaks
For the last few years, the war in Afghanistan seemed to be an afterthought in the U.S. media. That all changed in a hurry with the publication of tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents by the website WikiLeaks.
read moreThere’s Still Big Money in War
Dwight Eisenhower got it straight all right, but he didn’t know the half of it. He prophetically warned us about the “Military-Industrial Complex,” though Blackwater and KBR hadn’t even been invented yet. You’ve heard of them–they’re the contractors who service our armies of occupation so that we don’t need to hire so many soldiers. Sort of mercenary supply companies. Naturally, they lobby for more conflicts.
read moreThe Lineup: Week of August 2-8, 2010
Here’s what you’ll find in the latest OtherWords editorial package, which features an op-ed and a cartoon on the WikiLeaks controversy. In his weekly column, Donald Kaul worries about what American politicians are doing to future generations. Get all this and more in your inbox by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do.
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Evidence of a Failed Mission
WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary, a trove of 91,370 previously secret documents, is an important first history of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Of course, mistakes will be found–but these are reports of military leaders to others in the military. This is where they tell the truth. It’s significant that the Obama administration has not tried to claim the reports are inaccurate. Instead, they’re claiming that disclosing the reports somehow endangers U.S. troops, while at the same time disparaging the documents as having no new information.
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