3/15/2003
If we are to hold a vision of America that doesn't depend on foreign sources of oil and doesn't require the enormous expenditures of money and blood to project and protect empire, simply saying "stop the war" isn't enough. We must clearly articulate a vision of what America could be in a world in balance, a world at peace, and a world where the planet's vital natural resources are protected and renewed. This is the ultimate family value, the highest patriotism, and the most desperately needed story to guide the next generation of Americans. Read the column.
11/15/2001
It is common knowledge that the sanctions against Iraq have not caused the overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein. They have accomplished something, however: the death by disease of over a half million children due to the lack of pure water. This was deliberate, dear reader, and Madeleine Albright, our Secretary of State under Clinton, stated on television that the death and suffering of Iraqi people, including the children, was "worth it." If you don't believe that our leadership intended all this suffering, which continues to this very day, read the military's own documents.
11/02/2001
Pakistan's chief spy Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad "was in the US when the attacks occurred." He arrived in the US on the 4th of September, a full week before the attacks. He had meetings at the State Department "after" the attacks on the WTC. But he also had "a regular visit of consultations" with his US counterparts at the CIA and the Pentagon during the week prior to September 11. continued...
10/16/2001
Wendell Berry, poet, writer, farmer, and author of The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, pens his manifesto on the radical alteration of the American mindscape since the disasters of September 11. This alteration has raised the specter that the emergency will be used as an excuse to destroy our liberties and to drown the world in violence. It has also created the mental and spiritual space to consider the course upon which we are now proceeding and to make modifications before we are irretrievably drawn into calamity. These are important words. Read them carefully.
10/04/2001
A disturbing article from the website Kelebek, named after the Turkish word for butterflys, concerning a deeply racist article by the renowned Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci published in a mainstream Italian daily. Read the article.
10/3/2001
Among those who escaped injury in the recent disasters was an American establishment responsible for the costliest military defeat against a foreign adversary ever to occur on home soil. Read the column.
9/19/2001
An article on the response of the administration to the recent destruction of the World Trade Center and the economic implications. Read the article.
9/12/2001
The hijacking of four American passenger planes and the suicidal flying of three of them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, killing thousands of innocent persons, is a horror difficult to take in. We expect numerous thoughtful pieces on this disaster and will post the majority of them on a separate page. Read the commentaries.
9/11/2001
A commentary by University of Wisconsin Oshkosh communications professor Tony Palmeri on the calamitous events of September 11, 2001, including the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the partial destruction of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Read the commentary.
7/22/2001
The CIA, under pressure from Republicans in Congress, recently fired the Rand Corporation for refusing to find the Peoples Republic of China to be ten feet tall and a present military danger to the U.S. It looks like we are manufacturing a new enemy. Read the article.
7/22/2001
Jeffrey Weiss, Education Director/Central Region for the American Friends Service Committee, investigates the media's parroting of a bogus report on Iraq's imports of weapons. Read the article.
12/29/2000
Now that president-elect Bush has announced critical cabinet appointments, we can be certain that he will push for a national missile defense system. The prospects are ominous. Read the article.
8/2/2000
The Guardian (UK) reports on the growing opposition within Britain (including the government), to deployment of the proposed National Missile Defense System in Britain. Read the Article.
6/20/2000
Once again, the greatest opportunity for lasting peace in half a century is fading; What we are being sold as security, an anti-ballistic missile system, will most certainly bring us insecurity because it will make other nations of the world insecure. We now live in a world in which security is indivisible. As long as one small nation is insecure, then we are all insecure. Read the article
by Theodore A. Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
3/7/2000
The Clinton administration is relentlessly moving toward an ill-informed decision this summer to deploy an untested and fundamentally unworkable national missile defense (NMD) system. The administration claims this technically flawed defense is needed to negate an unproven long-range missile threat posed by "rogue" states. The result could well be the renewal of the cold war, the escalation of tensions between the U.S., Russia and China, and another arms race. This article appeares in the current issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but we thought it to be so important that we sought and received permission from the Bulletin to reproduce it in full on the JP web site.Now, more than ever, war is too important to be left to either generals or politicans in thrall to a voracious military-industrial complex that would impoverish all but a few of us in the name of national security. Let it not be someday said of us that we neglected and perhaps forefeited the futures of our children and grandchildren by our apathy and willful ignorance of the dangers into which our leaders are even now thrusting us. Read the article. If you think it has merit, act for once like a citizen, instead of a consumer.
1/26/2000
LUND- The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, (TFF), based in the ancient ecclesiastical and university town of Lund in the south of Sweden, combines research into the origins of human conflict and practical application as mediators in some of the high profile dramas of our age, first and foremost in ex-Yugoslavia, but also in Georgia and, most recently, in Burundi. Read the article.
10/13/99
Today the Senate by a vote of 51-48, rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, largely on party lines. Our own senator, Trent Lott, was largely responsible for both calling up the treaty for a vote and in its defeat.The Senate has rejected one other major treaty in this century: The Versailles Treaty ending the First World War and forming the League of Nations. The results of our failure to join the League were horrendous--another war, far more devastating than the first. Let us pray that this second rejection by a Senate, which now appears to consist mostly of intellectual pygmies, of a treaty negotiated by a president of the opposite party, will not prove as disastrous as the first rejection. It is clear from comments in the New York Times today that, although Lott and his colleagues were aware of the precedent, they seemed oddly ignorant of its outcome:
"The fact that the Senate has rejected several significant treaties this century underscores the important quality control function that was intended by the framers of the Constitution," he [Lott] said.What can we do, now? First, we can refuse to forget the lessons of history. George Santayana once wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The behavior of the United States Senate today is a perfect illustration of the truth of Santayana's dictum. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lesson the danger of a nuclear holocaust. It posed no danger to the security of the United States. It should have been ratified.
Second, we can do our best to make sure that our nation, and especially its elected officials, cannot forget the past: how the partisan follies of an ignorant and arrogant assembly of men obsessed with their own power and importance laid the foundations for The Second World War and the death of millions, and how a similar mindset today in our leaders has the potential to bring about wars, in comparison to which the previous "world" wars would be mere skirmishes, that could destroy all human life. Such are the wages of ignorance and arrogance.
Third, we can take heart in the knowledge that the people of this nation desire, by an overwhelming majority, that nuclear weapons be abolished, permanently and securely, and that the United States Senate does not reflect the wisdom or the wishes of the people they represent on this matter. Things can be turned around. It will take time and effort, but it can be done.
10/13/99
Pakistan, along with its archrival, India, has the bomb. Now it has a military government, possibly more corrupt than the government of Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, that it replaced. The coup was precipitated by Sharif's firing of General Pervez Musharraf, head of the armed forces, who was returning home from Sri Lanka when his firing was announced. Soldiers immediately took over the television station in Islambad and surrounded the home of the prime minister. The military shortly thereafter announced that Sharif's government had been "dismissed."India immediately put its forces on alert. In light of the fact that Musharraf was the general behind the attempted invasion by Pakistani troops of Kashmir this summer, India has reasons to be concerned. An unstable nuclear power is something to be concerned about, indeed! As the JP has said before, the United States and its allies have been extremely naive in their belief that they can keep the nuclear club limited to only a few nations. As technology becomes more and more sophisticated, the costs and skills required to develop and manufacture nuclear weapons will inevitably diminish. Unless there is general agreement to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle, sooner or later, just about everybody will have their own magic lamp.
Jacqueline Cabasso, specialist in nuclear disarmament, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, and a member of the Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said today: "The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was supposed to be a disarmament treaty. It was supposed to cut off the modernization and development of nuclear weapons and lead to their deterioration and eventual elimination. That's why most of the world's countries have made the CTBT their top disarmament priority in international negotiating fora. And that's why the vast majority of Americans support the CTBT today. Yet the current Senate debate has made clear that the Clinton administration's intent is to 'ban the bang, not the bomb' and that the U.S. plans to maintain and modernize its nuclear arsenal indefinitely, with or without explosive underground testing, through the $4.5 billion a year 'Stockpile Stewardship' program.... We can't expect countries like India and Pakistan to `do as we say, not as we do.'"
Jay Truman, one of the nation's foremost authorities on nuclear bomb testing, stated, "Yesterday's sudden military coup in Pakistan can only make a dangerous situation worse and dramatically raises the risks of a nuclear confrontation between the world's newest nuclear power and its arch enemy India. One clear option open to the new military government to solidify support will be to quickly engage in additional nuclear testing as a show of power over rival India. Should that occur, India will likely conduct yet another round of nuclear testing to one-up Pakistan.... The failure of the U.S. to take the lead in securing a truly Comprehensive Test Ban and other measures starting on the path to nuclear disarmament clearly shares a major part of the blame for the recent nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan."
During the 1950s, Truman grew up in Southern Utah, where he watched mushroom clouds rise from the Nevada Test Site about 110 miles to the west. Today, he is director of the Downwinders organization.
Copyright 2000 by Thomas Lowe. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction is hereby authorized as long as this notice is included.