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Engaged In Good Causes: Longtime War Criminal Inexplicably, Unconscionably Gets Not Jail Sentence But Award (WTF?)

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By Abby Zimet / CommonDreams

Having blithely orchestrated several genocides and the deaths of millions of brown-skinned innocents in the specious, imperial name of the right to bomb neutral countries in order to save them and maybe us – a right that America, despite our ongoing carnage, still claims – Henry Kissinger, our best and brightest war criminal, on Monday won the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Defense Department’s highest honor for private citizens.

In a stomach-roiling spectacle at the Pentagon wherein one discordantly unfit Nobel Peace Prize winner honors another, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called the former Secretary of State’s murderous service “unique in the annals of American diplomacy.” Kissinger, Carter said, “demonstrated how serious thinking and perspective can deliver solutions to seemingly intractable problems.”   [Read more…]

Daniel Berrigan Dead at 94

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Jesuit priest lived life of peace activism

By Andrea Germanos / CommonDreams

Daniel Berrigan—Jesuit priest, peace activist, poet, author, and inspiration to countless people—died on Saturday. He was 94 years old.

When America magazine asked a then-88-year-old Berrigan if he had any regrets over the course of his long life, he replied, “I could have done sooner the things I did, like Catonsville.”

In 1968, Berrigan and eight other Catholic activists, including his brother Philip, a group subsequently known as the Catonsville Nine, took hundreds of draft files and burned them outside a Selective Service office with homemade napalm.   [Read more…]

2016 Goldman Environmental Awards Announced Under Shadow of Murder of 2015 Recipient, Berta Cáceres

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The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced Monday the six recipients of its annual Goldman Environmental Prize, the largest eco-related prize in the world. The prize, established in 1989 by the late civic philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman, is also known as the Green Nobel. Chosen to represent Earth’s different geographic zones, each prize recipient will receive $175,000, no strings attached. It’s not unusual for them to donate their award or plow it back into their environmental efforts.

The recipients this year are Edward Loure, of Tanzania; Leng Ouch, Cambodia; Zuzana Caputova, of Slovakia; Luis Jorge River Herrera, of Puerto Rico; Destiny Watford, from the United States; and Máxima Acuña, of Peru.

An invitation-only ceremony tonight in San Francisco likely will be more solemn than usual. Early last month, one of last year’s recipients of the prize, Berta Cáceres, was found shot dead in a small town in her homeland of Honduras, near the border of El Salvador. The slaying is unsolved.   [Read more…]

Joseph Medicine Crow, Last Crow War Chief and Living Link to Battle of Little Bighorn, Dies at 102

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Devoted Indigenous rights advocate and chronicler of Plains Indian history died this weekend in hospice in Billings, Montana

By Nika Knight / CommonDreams

Joseph Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief and a passionate historian, died on Sunday at age 102.

A member of the Crow tribe, Medicine Crow was an outspoken advocate for his people, whose suffering he witnessed in the wake of the U.S. government’s relegation of American Indian tribes to reservations and the policy of cultural genocide in government-run boarding schools.

  [Read more…]

New Veteran-Led Campaign Challenges Islamophobia

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By Brian Trautman

Violence against American Muslims is growing faster than at any time since 9/11, with assaults on Muslim individuals and their places of worship having tripled since the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks. A NY Times article published last December cites several examples, which include shootings and vandalism.

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), last year set a record for the highest number of incidents targeting U.S. Mosques. As a result of this violence, Muslims across the country, including women and children, have conveyed to the public that they genuinely fear for their safety and security.   [Read more…]

Why Are Innocent People Being Killed by Terrorists?

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Many people cannot understand why radical Islamists are killing innocent people as happened in Brussels recently. What did these people ever do to them to justify their being ruthlessly terminated as they were just going about their everyday lives in a peaceful manner?

It’s not as though many innocent civilians in the Middle East have not had their lives terminated as they were simply going about their business. As many as 12 civilians were killed in December 2013 in Yemen when a US drone targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going toward the groom’s village. Since 2002, drones piloted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have killed hundreds of people in the country, mostly members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but also dozens of civilians, including children.   [Read more…]

Readers Write: All War is International

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By Michael-Leonard Creditor

Listening to the news that March 15 was the fifth anniversary of the start of the current Syrian internal conflict it came to me that there’s no such thing as a “civil war” anymore.

Of course, I’m familiar with the joke about that phrase being an oxymoron. But, I mean an armed conflict between factions or regions within a country, rather than between separate nations.

Used to be, a nation/state could have a domestic conflict (again, I don’t mean a husband and wife argument) and it wouldn’t affect any other nation/state. But, that’s simply not true any longer. It is seeing the terrible results on the international stage of Syria’s five-year old war that creates and cements this new truth in my mind.   [Read more…]

Hugh Thompson, An American Hero

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By Jack Doxey

March 16th, 2016 marks the 48th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre that occurred in Vietnam. To say that it was a sad day in the history of our country is a gross understatement. Our United States military systematically slaughtered over 500 Vietnamese women, children, infants and old men in the tiny village of My Lai.

Our country’s attention span is short; and revisiting old wounds can be painful. The result is that this event has been shoved into the “dust bin” of history.

Never the less, I beseech our government and every American citizen to not forget but instead “learn” from the events that unfolded 48 years ago in the tiny village of My Lai.   [Read more…]

The Day Ocean Beach Became an Armed Police State

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Editor’s Note: The following was originally published February 22, 2009, and just about every year we repost it to remind the different generations of today’s OBceans of some of the rich history that makes up the fabric of Ocean Beach, whether one likes it or not. Here’s the history lesson, with only the number of years edited.

On February 22, 1974 — 42 years ago — all hell broke loose in Ocean Beach. And for many of the ’70s generation, this day will always live on in their memory as a day of infamy – the day the world came crashing down on our little seaside community.

It was the day that Pete Mahone, a politicized ex-convict and member of OB’s anti-Vietnam war community, tried to commit suicide by cop. It was also the breaking point in police-community relations, relations that had been simmering for years.   [Read more…]

Fray Serra o Capitan Frémont

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Part Six of Six*, with translation. Source: History of San Diego by William E Smythe. All quotes are from this book.

Transcribed by John Lawrence / From the original San Diego Free Press, circa 1969.

Las festividades del se gundo centenario de California se iniciaron en la ciudad de San Diego con toda la pompa y alboroto disponibles. El proposito de dichas festividades se supone que es el de con memorar la fundacion de California en San Diego. Aquel historico evento fue efectuado por Fray Junípero en 1769.   [Read more…]

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