San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Government / Military

Glenn Greenwald Speaks on Edward Snowden’s Leaks

by

By Doug Porter

Journalist Glenn Greenwald came to town last weekend to promote his best selling book based on events surrounding former systems administrator Edward Snowden’s decision to go public with documents concerning intelligence programs run by the National Security Agency. It was a most unusual evening: part lecture, part political rally and part celebrity appearance.

Seven hundred people paid money to attend a book tour event in a theater in this day and age. His publisher set up a table in the lobby and sold hundreds of copies of “No Place to Hide.” After Glenn Greenwald’s one hour presentation about one third of the audience waited patiently in line for an autograph. San Diego was day four of this six-city excursion around the country.

He’s a man on a mission and he’s trying to make a difference. Greenwald and other journalists have peeled back the curtain on some of the government’s deepest secrets, working with a variety of news outlets with well-established records of journalistic integrity, reporting on the activities of National Security Agency and their cohorts in the United Kingdom, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.   [Read more…]

Riot Control Drone Comes with Pepper Spray, Paintball Guns and Blinding Lasers

by

By Doug Porter

The BBC released a story today trumpeting the initial sale of a remotely controlled octo-copter built specifically for crowd control situations. South African manufacturer Desert Wolf says its eight rotored “Skunk” can fire 80 doses of pepper spray per second from a storage tank holding 4000 pepper spray paintballs, plastic balls or other “non-lethal” ammunition.

Call them drones, RPVs, UASs, UVAs, SUAs or whatever. Remotely controlled robots are a big business in San Diego. A recent Voice of San Diego series covered the nascent industry’s impact on the local economy (more than a dozen companies),along with the uncertainty surrounding their use and development.

While I’m sure these machines can and should be be used for good purposes, the BBC story brings to light yet another moral dilemma facing society as technology continues to advance.  

  [Read more…]

Absolutely Nothing

by

By Jim Wright / Stonekettle Station

Tragically, all we’ve fought for in Iraq, all that 4,500 American lives were shed to gain, is on the cusp, potentially, of vanishing.

– Mitt Romney, “Ideas Summit,” 6/13/2014

All we fought for in Iraq.

All we fought for in Iraq is on the cusp of vanishing.

That’s what Mitt Romney says.

We fought for. We fought for. We.

Oh, so it’s we now, is it, Mitt?

We.

  [Read more…]

The War in Iraq Cost $4 Trillion and An Enormous Loss of Life: Here Are 8 Warmongers Who Would Take Us Back

by

Republican warmongers are beating their drum again.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet

The Iraq War hawks are back. And they have two knee-jerk ways of seeing the convulsions in Iraq where Sunni militants have seized cities from Syria to Baghdad’s doorstep, killing government workers and civilians, and grabbing weapons from a vanishing Iraqi Army.

First, it is always President Obama’s fault; and second, the U.S. must return to war, despite what has been one of the biggest debacles in American military history. Hawks are only happy when we are at war, fueling the military-industrial complex as U.S. soldiers die and platoons of maimed veterans return home to underfunded medical care.

The Iraq hawks are furious that the war effort, with almost 4,500 troop deaths, 320,000 veterans with brain injuries, costs estimated to top $4 trillion, and 650,000 or more Iraqi civilian deaths has come to this.   [Read more…]

It’s Friday the 13th and Things Aren’t Going Well for the Neo-Conservative Agenda

by

By Doug Porter

Friday the thirteenth is proving to be a bad day at the end of a bad week for the nation’s neo-conservative types.

Internationally, their grand strategy in the war against terrorism is unraveling as Iraq implodes. The forces of Islamic insurgency–which weren’t players prior to the US invasion–are marching on Baghdad, fueled by covert support from our ‘allies’ in the war on terror. The nation that was supposed to be President Bush’s beacon for democracy in the middle east is likely to end up as Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish partitions ruled by warlords propped up by the Saudis, Iran and Big Oil.

Domestically, the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor by an insurgent Tea Party candidate signals, as Paul Krugman notes in the New York Times today, the unraveling of an alliance where so-called ‘movement conservatives’ (vested in a crony capitalist agenda) used social fears to motivate Tea Party voting blocks at election time.   [Read more…]

Don’t Walk Away from War : It’s Not the American Way

by

By Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch.com

The United States has been at war — major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions — nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.

Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.   [Read more…]

Who’s Really the Traitor Here? Thoughts about Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl

by

By Ernie McCray

My goodness, a man, Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, gets released from a 5 year imprisonment in Afghanistan, and there are those who want to condemn him, as a traitor, allegations that are no more than speculations based on shaky observations.

“He walked away from his duty! And people died looking for him!” people say as though in war it’s out of the ordinary for someone to freak out and want to flee and maybe say to his foe “I don’t want to shoot another one of y’all anymore! I can’t stand to see another child run in fear when I walk near them. I can no longer stand to see them shake in their pants, ever again” – aka “consorting” with the enemy. We’re human beings. We’re supposed to care. It’s in our nature somewhere.

If we paused for a moment couldn’t we consider that if the Taliban gave Bergdahl a single sandwich in those five years he was in their hands that he was more of a drain on their resources than any kind of aid to them? And, in war, don’t soldiers die all the time while “looking for somebody?” Can we try to understand?   [Read more…]

Memorial Day: Remembering 70 U.S. Wars, Big and Small

by

By Clancy Sigal / Alternet

Except for mourning family members and Boy Scouts loyally placing tiny flags on veterans’ gravestones, hardly anyone knows anything about Memorial Day except that it’s a day off. It’s the saddest of the military holidays, invented after the Civil War, supposed to help us honor, or at least pause to remember, all the American dead from all  our wars. That’s a lot of men and some women to remember going back, well, how far?

Big and small, we’ve “done” about 70 wars starting with the mid-18th century so-called French and Indian wars where George Washington was bloodied and when we got our first taste of industrially massacring Native Americans, mainly Ojibwas and Algonquins who sided with the French against our British masters.

Before penicillin, it’s hard to get an accurate sum total figure of all those combat deaths because so many men died of disease and what was later called shell shock.   [Read more…]

Border Patrol Violence Report at Issue in ACLU Suit

by

By Doug Porter

The ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties filed a complaint in federal court yesterday against Customs and Border Protection claiming the agency has failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the release of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) report analyzing the agency’s use-of-force policies and practices.

 The ACLU filed the FOIA on February 21, 2014, but says it has received no response—not even an acknowledgement of receipt of the FOIA.

“Custom and Border Protection’s failure to even respond to our FOIA request exemplifies the agency’s resistance to transparency and accountability,” said Mitra Ebadolahi, staff attorney for the San Diego ACLU’s Border Litigation Project. “The PERF report is an important document, one that details CBP’s problematic and potentially unlawful use-of-force policies and practices. The report should be made public in its entirety, immediately.”

  [Read more…]

Memory Against Forgetting: The May 1970 Peace Memorial at UCSD

by

Editor: the following is based on a speech delivered by the author, Niall Twohig on last Friday, May 9th, in front of a group of fifty gathered in Revelle Plaza at UC San Diego to unveil The May 1970 Peace Memorial. The Memorial is dedicated to George Winne, who immolated himself and died as a protest against the Vietnam War in May of 1970, plus it’s dedicated to those students who carried on the May 1970 Student Strike.

By Niall Twohig

Why a memorial for May 1970? Why a memorial for peace? Why now?

To suggest some answers, I want to ask you, the reader, to take an imaginative leap back in time to May 1970.

In order to make this leap, we have to remember that the U.S. was waging an unpopular proxy war in Southeast Asia, made all the more unpopular after the invasion of Cambodia at the end of April.

If we found ourselves transported to May 1970, this would be all too apparent. We would see the images?the aerial views of bombs upon bombs pulverizing the Vietnamese countryside, images of GIs burning huts, footage of badly burnt villagers running from the firestorm of napalm, photos of rows upon rows of mutilated bodies scattered in the fields and anonymous soldiers packed away in coffins draped in stars and stripes.   [Read more…]

Pilots Come Clean: Drone Warfare Is Riddled with Tragic, Bloody Errors

by

Imagine if the drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen had a human face all the time.

By Pratap Chatterjee / AlterNet via Tom Dispatch 

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.   [Read more…]

The CIA Aided Polio’s Comeback–but Media Have Forgotten the Story

by

By  / Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting 

Polio had been battled to near-extinction after decades of effort, but this year the WHO confirmed 68 new cases and declared it an international public health emergency. Nearly 80 percent of those cases are in Pakistan.

Why is this? According to the New York Times‘ Donald McNeil Jr. (5/6/14), “Polio has never been eliminated there, Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in North Waziristan for years, and those elsewhere have murdered vaccine teams.” McNeil also quotes a WHO spokesperson towards the top of the piece: “So we’re saying to the Pakistanis, the Syrians and the Cameroonians, ‘You’ve really got to get your acts together.”‘

The Times underlined the emergency today in an editorial, explaining that Pakistan has such high numbers “largely because Taliban factions have forbidden vaccinations in conservative tribal areas and attacked healthcare workers elsewhere.”

  [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry