Barack spoke Wednesday at West Point. In preparation for swimsuit season, Barack's on G. Gordon Liddy's Federal Prison Camp Diet and hopes to shed an average of 20 facts a week. The speech showed him succeeding in reducing body facts and he's rumored to have lost 17 facts with regards to Iraq alone (we noted his Iraq lie in the Wednesday snapshot).
Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions.
He said today: "The World Court ruled in the case Nicaragua brought
against the U.S. in Nicaragua's favor, condemning the U.S.'s
'indirect form of support for subversive or terrorist armed activities
within another State. ... These forms of action are therefore wrongful
in the light of both the principle of non-use of force, and that of
non-intervention' Thus, the U.S. and other states
arming groups in Syria is illegal."
That's from this IPA news release:
MATT HOWARD, media at ivaw.org, @ivaw
Howard is communications director for Iraq Veterans Against the War. On Memorial Day they released “Fort Hood Testimonies Report,” summarized in their statement “Fort Hood Soldiers Treated As Disposable.”
Howard said today: “The trauma and abuse outlined in this Fort Hood
report are the product of 13 consecutive years of war we never should
have fought in the first place. The traumas, toxic legacies, and torn
social fabric in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to spread harm to these
countries and destabilize and militarize the region, and we continue to
bring our invisible wounds back home and spread them to our families and
loved ones. The real way to end this tragedy is to stop the U.S.
policies responsible. This means stop arms shipments to Iraq and
immediately withdraw all troops from Afghanistan. Leaving 10,000 troops
behind is not a real end to that war.” See from the media watch group FAIR: “Crediting Obama for Bringing Troops Home — Without Noting He Sent Them Abroad.”
ANAND GOPAL, via Brooke Parsons, brooke.parsons at hholt.com, @Anand_Gopal_
A fellow at the New America Foundation, Gopal just wrote the piece “How
the U.S. Created the Afghan War — and Then Lost It, The Unreported
Story of How the Harqqani Network Became America’s Greatest Enemy.” Gopal is author of the new book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes.
He said today: “Well, it wasn’t really a surprise because the Pentagon
had been asking for around that number of troops and this is what he
delivered. But it’s important to realize that the war’s not going to
end, even after 2016, because the U.S. is allied with power brokers,
warlords also the Afghan army who are going to be continuing to fight
the ‘war on terror’ on the U.S.’s behalf. For the next two years it’ll
be special operations forces, when he says ‘counterterrorism
operations,’ what he means is night raids, targeted killings and allying
with these warlords. When I say warlords, I mean private contractors
because the U.S. is paying for them essentially, they are mercenaries,
they’re paramilitary forces, there’s hundreds of thousands of them
around the country.”
FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at illinois.edu
Boyle is a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of Tackling America’s Toughest Questions.
He said today: “The World Court ruled in the case Nicaragua brought
against the U.S. in Nicaragua’s favor, condemning the U.S.’s ‘indirect
form of support for subversive or terrorist armed activities within
another State. … These forms of action are therefore wrongful in the
light of both the principle of non-use of force, and that of
non-intervention’ Thus, the U.S. and other states arming groups in Syria
is illegal.”
ROBERT NAIMAN, naiman at justforeignpolicy.org, @naiman
Policy director of Just Foreign Policy, Naiman recently wrote the article “The New York Times: Everybody Who’s Anybody Wants to Bomb Syria.” A petition
Naiman initiated has over 13,000 signers in the last 24 hours. It backs
an anti-establishment left-right alliance in Congress on Syria:
“President Obama and Congress should resist pressure for deeper U.S.
military involvement in Syria’s sectarian civil war. Members of Congress
should sign the Welch-Jones-Mulvaney-Conyers letter to President Obama
urging him to stand firm in his opposition to supplying Syrian
insurgents with manpads.”
KATHY KELLY, kathy at vcnv.org, @voiceinwild
Kelly is co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Her recent articles include
“Afghan Street Children Beg for Change.” She said today: “Superpower
exceptionalism is a self-defeating strategy. What we need is not a pivot
to Asia, but rather a pivot toward pragmatic balance of power politics,
away from exceptionalism of the superpower, and toward a balance of
power politics in which the major powers, (U.S., China, Russia, Germany,
Brazil, India, Britain, etc.) work cooperatively through international
institutions. Major tasks ahead involve conserving the resources of
earth and sharing them in an agreed system that is reasonably equitable,
rather than wasting resources in weapons competition, and then
destroying resources and economies in periodic warfare. Countries should
get together in the U.N. and work cooperatively so that we don’t
exhaust ourselves in military competition.”
Largely ignored in assessments of U.S. policy is the backing of the
coup in Honduras in 2009 and the resulting havoc in that country.
DANA FRANK, danafrank at ucsc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews with larger media outlets,
Frank is professor of history at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Her writings on post-2009 coup Honduras have appeared in the New York Times, ForeignAffairs.com, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Politico, The Nation (regularly) and many other publications.
She said today: “Once again, and now in even greater numbers, members
of the U.S. Congress are challenging the State Department’s ongoing
support for the brutal regime in Honduras, which continues to attack its
own citizens, run roughshod over the rule of law, and send in the
military to take over the country bit by bit — rather than clean up the
police which it admits are overwhelmingly corrupt. Rep. Schakowksy and
over 100 other representatives are asking loud and clear about the
militarization, the November election marked by widespread fraud and
violence against the opposition, and, most recently, the bald beating by
the new Military Police of opposition congress members right inside the
main hall of the Honduras Congress. How long will Obama and Kerry keep
ignoring Congress, and enthusiastically funding and celebrating the
Honduran thugs who are more dangerous than ever?”
ipa
francis a. boyle
