nicolas js davis
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">automagically put in top stories? 3 22 punked? Maidan</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_pro-Russian_unrest_in_Ukraine">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_pro-Russian_unrest_in_Ukraine</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AlterNet and Nicolas J. S. Davies May 05, 2014</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2014/05/fiery-chaos-odessa-42-perish-after-ukrainians-launch-waco-assault/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2014/05/fiery-chaos-odessa-42-perish-after-ukrainians-launch-waco-assault/</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27268775" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The death toll in Odessa</a> stands at 42 people killed, most of them burned to death or suffocated by smoke inhalation in the inferno at the Trade Unions House. There is no dispute over who were the victims and who were their killers. <b> The victims were pro-Russian protesters who had occupied the building. The attackers who set fire to it with petrol bombs were members of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Sector" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Right Sector</a>, the ultra-Nationalist strike force of the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in February. </b></font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Right Sector leader <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Yarosh" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dmytro Yarosh</a> told <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/28/yarosh-russians-rise-against-putin-248025.html" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Newsweek on March 19th</a> that the Western-backed coup regime in Kiev has organized Right Sector militia members into new paramilitary forces for a "war" to "cleanse the country" of pro-Russian protesters.</span> So it is not clear whether the militiamen responsible for the mass murder in Odessa were in fact newly recruited Ukrainian "National Guard" troops or just "civilian" Right Sector thugs, nor whether they were locals from Odessa or forces sent in from Kiev, Lviv or elsewhere in Western Ukraine.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Americans, a more serious question hangs over Ukraine's Waco in Odessa and indeed over the entire U.S. role in the crisis in Ukraine. The earliest media reports of Right Sector's existence date only from January 2014 as it took charge of the protests in Kiev, and the earliest article on <a href="http://pravyysektor.info/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Right Sector's web site</a> dates from November 25th 2013. Right Sector was created less than six months ago, as the<b> U.S. State Department and the CIA was already <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">laying the groundwork</a> for the coup in Ukraine.</b> So what role has the U.S. played in the recruiting, training and direction of this group that now has so much blood on its hands?</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dmytro Yarosh, Right Sector's leader, joined the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Stepan Bandera</a> All-Ukrainian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryzub(organization)" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Tryzub (Trident)</a> paramilitary organization in 1994. He became the head of the militia in 2005. Like the neo-Nazi <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda(political_party)" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Svoboda Party</a>, one of three parties in the coup government, Tryzub drew inspiration from the World War II-era Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera and his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists</a>, who massacred tens of thousands of Poles and Jews during World War II and supported German campaigns that killed many more.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Despite his early collaboration with the Nazis, Bandera soon fell foul of the German occupiers in Ukraine and spent most of the war in the Zellenbau prison for political prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp</b>. Like his hero, Yarosh speaks fiercely of Ukrainian independence from both Russia and the West, although most of his venom is directed at Russia and Russians in Ukraine. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> As in <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/mi6-the-cia-and-turkeys-rogue-game-in-syria-9256551.html" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Syria</a> and <a href="http://alternettest.wpengine.com/world/35-countries-where-us-has-supported-fascists-druglords-and-terrorists" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">throughout the world</a>, the violent, dangerous forces the U.S. recruited and deployed to overthrow Ukraine's government are not entirely under U.S. control but are more easily directed toward violence and chaos than toward any constructive purpose.</span></font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, in the wake of Right Sector's inferno in Odessa, we have to ask a second question, "What role is the CIA still playing today in directing or advising Right Sector as it commits mass murder in Odessa and wages war on pro-Russian protesters across the country?"</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">NATO leaders formally declared in Bucharest on April 3rd 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia "<a href="http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">will become members of NATO</a>." <b>U.S. coup manager Victoria Nuland</b> flew back from Kiev to tell the <b>National Press Club</b> in Washington on December 13th 2013 that the U.S. had <a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">spent $5 billion to "help Ukraine,"</a> and that it had not spent all that money for nothing</span>. Then Mrs. Kagan flew back to Kiev to oversee the transition from the recruitment and movement building phase of the coup to the unleashing of Right Sector street violence in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hrushevskoho_Street_riots" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Hrushevskoho Street riots</a> in Kiev on January 19th. As America's angel of death flew back and forth across the Atlantic in taxpayer-funded comfort, the 42 victims of Ukraine's Waco in Odessa were living their lives and minding their own business, with no inkling of the unfolding scheme that would lead to their horrific deaths.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Routinely omitted from the Western propaganda narrative on Ukraine is the fact that Russia has had a <a href="http://newsru.com/pict/big/1638517.html" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reasonable proposal for the future of Ukraine</a> on the table all along, since before the emergence of Right Sector, before the coup in Kiev and before Russia reclaimed Crimea in response to the coup.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russia's proposal is for a neutral and federal Ukraine. NATO leaders would abandon their plans to absorb Ukraine into NATO, and the different regions of Ukraine would be granted greater autonomy under a new federal constitution. This offers the hope of ending the back-and-forth all-or-nothing power struggle that has turned the people of Ukraine into pawns of Russian- and Western-backed oligarchs and their foreign allies since 1991.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The main obstacle to the Russian proposal is its reasonableness</b>. It's really the only sensible framework for a solution to the crisis. But the U.S., its NATO allies and the coup government in Kiev have staked out extreme positions, calling pro-Russian Ukrainians "terrorists", threatening them with military force and blaming Russia for everything. This makes it difficult for the U.S. and its allies to accept Russia's proposal without very obviously and publicly backing down.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>F<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/20/fmr_us_ambassador_behind_crimea_crisis" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">ormer US Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock</a> has urged the Obama administration to stop making aggressive public statements and to engage in quiet diplomacy to resolve the crisis, before matters get any worse for the people of Ukraine or for U.S.-Russian relations. </b>Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) has urged the president to ask NATO to formally rescind the 2008 Bucharest declaration that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and to work in good faith to implement the April 17th Geneva agreement to de-escalate the crisis. Above all, VIPS writes, Obama must "<a href="http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/28/obama-urged-to-show-restraint-on-ukraine/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">let cooler heads prevail</a>."</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, <b>if Right Sector leaders and the coup government are still getting very different advice and direction from their CIA case officers at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev,</b> none of this will work and we can expect further escalation, more Right Sector atrocities and the rising danger of an unthinkable war between the U.S. and Russia. It will be no comfort to recognize that none of that had to happen.</font></p></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/nicolas-j-s-davies">https://www.alternet.org/author/nicolas-j-s-davies</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are 12 ways the US invasion of Iraq lives on in infamy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Independent Media Institute Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies March 16, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against five of the militia’s weapons factories and announced it is sending two more aircraft carriers to the region, as well as new Patriot missile systems and hundreds more troops to operate them. This contradicts the January vote of the Iraqi Parliament that called for U.S. troops to leave the country. It also goes against the sentiment of most Americans, who think the Iraq war was not worth fighting, and against the campaign promise of Donald Trump to end the endless wars.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are 10 ways Trump’s actions against Iran hurt Americans and the region</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies January 11, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. assassination of General Qassem Soleimani has not yet plunged us into a full-scale war with Iran thanks to the Iranian government’s measured response, which demonstrated its capabilities without actually harming U.S. troops or escalating the conflict. But the danger of a full-blown war still exists, and Donald Trump’s actions are already wreaking havoc.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Iraqis rise up against 16 years of ‘made in the USA’ corruption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies December 05, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Iraqis were mourning 40 protesters killed by police and soldiers that day in Baghdad, Najaf and Nasiriyah. Nearly 400 protesters have been killed since hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets at the beginning of October. Human rights groups have described the crisis in Iraq as a “bloodbath,” Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi has announced he will resign, and Sweden has opened an investigation against Iraqi Defense Minister Najah Al-Shammari, who is a Swedish citizen, for crimes against humanity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why aren’t Americans rising up like we are seeing across the planet?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies November 16, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The waves of protests breaking out in country after country around the world beg the question: Why aren’t Americans rising up in peaceful protest like our neighbors? We live at the very heart of this neoliberal system that is force-feeding the systemic injustice and inequality of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. So we are subject to many of the same abuses that have fueled mass protest movements in other countries, including high rents, stagnant wages, cradle-to-grave debt, ever-rising economic inequality, privatized health care, a shredded social safety net, abysmal public transportation, systemic political corruption and endless war.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here's the truth about Trump’s fake withdrawal from our endless wars</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies October 18, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Monday, October 7, the U.S. withdrew 50 to 100 troops from positions near Syria’s border with Turkey, and two days later Turkey invaded Rojava, the de facto autonomous Kurdish region of northeast Syria. Trump is now taking credit for a temporary, tenuous ceasefire. In a blizzard of tweets and statements, Donald Trump has portrayed his chaotic tactical relocation of U.S. troops in Syria as a down payment on his endless promises to withdraw U.S. forces from endless wars in the greater Middle East.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The failure of militarized neoliberalism is laid bare in Iraq and Haiti</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies October 10, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This season could be called the Autumn of Discontent, as people from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean have been rising up against corrupt neoliberal governments. Two of the countries in crisis, Haiti and Iraq, are on opposite ends of the earth but have something important in common. Not only are they reeling from protests against government corruption and austerity programs, like Ecuador and Algeria, but in both Haiti and Iraq, their corrupt neoliberal governments were imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Will Americans let Trump trigger World War III for Saudi Arabia and Israel?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies September 18, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Saturday, September 14, two oil refineries and other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia were hit and set ablaze by 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles, dramatically slashing Saudi Arabia’s oil production by half, from about 10 million to 5 million barrels per day. On September 18, the Trump administration, blaming Iran, announced it was imposing more sanctions on Iran, and voices close to Donald Trump are calling for military action. But this attack should lead to just the opposite response: urgent calls for an immediate end to the war in Yemen and an end to U.S. economic warfare against Iran.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why US sanctions are economic sabotage that is deadly, illegal and ineffective</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies June 18, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the mystery of who is responsible for sabotaging the two tankers in the Gulf of Oman remains unsolved, it is clear that the Trump administration has been sabotaging Iranian oil shipments since May 2, when it announced its intention to “bring Iran’s oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.” The move was aimed at China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey, all nations that purchase Iranian oil and now face U.S. threats if they continue to do so. The U.S. military might not have physically blown up tankers carrying Iranian crude, but its actions have the same effect and should be considered acts of economic terrorism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Do any of the Democratic presidential candidates understand the power of peace?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Independent Media Institute Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies March 28, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Act in the wake of the Vietnam War, it has finally used it for the first time, to try to end the U.S.-Saudi war on the people of Yemen and to recover its constitutional authority over questions of war and peace. This hasn’t stopped the war yet, and President Trump has threatened to veto the bill. But its passage in Congress, and the debate it has spawned, could be an important first step on a tortuous path to a less militarized U.S. foreign policy in Yemen and beyond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bring the troops home, but also stop the bombing</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies Medea Benjamin December 24, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As our nation debates the merits of President Trump’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of U.S. military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S. air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Will the new House Democrats take on the war lobby?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies Nicolas J. S. Davies Medea Benjamin November 26, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new Democratic majority will take charge in the U.S. House of Representatives in January, thanks to a remarkable rebound in public participation in U.S. elections. Based on early data, it appears that over 49 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls this year, compared to a 70-year low of 36.4 percent in the last midterm in 2014. More than ever before, the Democrats should thank young voters for their success, as 18-to-39-year-olds appear to have voted for them by a two to one margin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who Represents You - Peacemakers, Warmongers or Fence Sitters?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies October 23, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a foreign policy crisis explodes over the apparent Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, the failure of the U.S. Congress to assert its constitutional war powers over three years of illegal U.S. military action in the war on Yemen and booming U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners is finally coming home to roost.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Merchants of Death Profit from the Bombing of Children as a US-Backed War Goes Largely Ignored</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies September 11, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As if the horrific Saudi bombing of a Yemeni school bus that killed 44 children on August 9, 2018, wasn’t bad enough, CNN reported that the bomb used in the attack was manufactured by Lockheed Martin, one of the major U.S. defense contractors. Nima Elbagir, reporting for CNN’s Situation Room, showed a map of Yemen pinpointing several other attacks where large numbers of civilians have been killed by bombs from not only Lockheed Martin, but also General Dynamics and Raytheon. It was a rare moment when a mainstream U.S. media outlet made the connection between U.S. weapons and the devastation they wreak.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How the War Industry Corrupts the U.S. Congress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies Independent Media Institute Nicolas J. S. Davies Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies June 18, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Former President Jimmy Carter has called U.S. politics a system of “legalized bribery” in which powerful interests spend billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign funding to ensure that members of Congress pay more attention to them than to the general public. With the upcoming midterm elections, we will see the full force of this tsunami of cash washing over our electoral system.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies March 15, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">March 19 marks 15 years since the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the American people have no idea of the enormity of the calamity the invasion unleashed. The U.S. military has refused to keep a tally of Iraqi deaths. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly told reporters, “We don’t do body counts.” One survey found that most Americans thought Iraqi deaths were in the tens of thousands. But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why Iraqis May See ISIL as Lesser Evil Compared To U.S.-Backed Death Squads</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies November 20, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The mostly Sunni Arab population of western and northern Iraq is faced with a diabolical choice between the brutal rule of IS and the even more murderous rule of their own government. Their life and death predicament is the direct result of past and present U.S. policy in Iraq.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America's Insane Policy of Committing War Crimes in the Name of Preventing Other War Crimes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies November 04, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"And we read from pleasant Bibles that are bound with blood and skin/That the wilderness is gathering all its children back again." —Leonard Cohen</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Western Imperialists Have Been Bombing Iraq for 100 Years</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies October 20, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Obama's campaign of aerial bombardment against ISIS in Iraq and Syria maintains a British colonial policy designed 100 years ago to avoid the consequences of putting large numbers of boots on the ground in what are now Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why the Showdown with Islamic Extremists Is the War the Pentagon Was Hoping For</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies September 28, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the U.S. escalates its bombing campaign against ISIS (or IS or ISIL), U.S. officials seem to have found an enemy we can all love to hate and fear. ISIS beheads hostages, conducts brutal ethnic cleansing and has links to Al-Qaeda. DC power players have eagerly embraced a small war made to order to restore America's wounded military pride after the first Iraq debacle. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The contrived nature of the narrative presented by U.S. officials was evident from the outset if one cared to look behind the propaganda screen. As the U.S. bombing campaign began, German Left Party MP Ulla Jelpke told a press conference in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) on August 11th that the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar were rescued by the Kurdish PKK, who the U.S. government classifies as "terrorists." Refugees told Jelpke that they were saved by "Allah and the PKK," not by U.S. bombing. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ulla Jelpke hailed the PKK as the most effective force fighting ISIS and other jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and she condemned Turkey for its role on the other side, providing bases, training and support to the jihadis. Even as Turkey has kept its border with Syria open to a flood of fighters and weapons, it has closed it to shipments of food and humanitarian supplies to Rojava, now home to thousands of Yazidi refugees. As Jelpke said, "If the US government and its allies are going to wage a serious struggle against ISIS, they must first end the support for the jihadis coming from Turkey and the Gulf states." </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the same time, journalist Judit Neurink, who has spent the past 5 years training local journalists in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, told Belgium's De Standaard newspaper that reports of ISIS massacres were exaggerated and based mainly on rumors. De Standaard asked, "Is the United States' bombing based on a false hypothesis?" She replied, "Yes. The US is bombing because the battle was approaching too close to Erbil, where a small American base lies. The Yazidis are useful to add a humanitarian sauce. Indeed there are also Christians fleeing. But if you act only for the Christians, other religious communities in the world would attack you. Now this Yazidi tragedy suited the Americans politically and the stories are exaggerated. Terrible things happen and have happened, that's a fact. But we have no numbers, no details." </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the Yazidis served their purpose for U.S. propaganda. The line was crossed, the bombing was under way and the United States was at war in Iraq… again. It would be naive to think that U.S. intelligence agencies knew less of the real picture than Jelpke and Neurink. But the domestic propaganda campaign has succeeded and a majority of Americans tell pollsters they approve of the bombing. The U.S. is building a "coalition of the willing" on a similar basis, persuading allies of the political benefits of aligning with U.S. policy. But the U.S. coalition excludes all three forces that are best placed to resist and marginalize ISIS: the Syrian Army; the PKK; and Iraq's Sunni tribes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After initially helping to drive out Iraqi government death squads, ISIS has outlived its purpose to Sunni Arab tribal leaders in northern and western Iraq. Most Sunni Iraqis don't want to be part of a fundamentalist Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, where 19 people were beheaded in August for offenses ranging from witchcraft to drug possession. Most Iraqi Sunnis just want civil and political rights in their own country, Iraq. But they justifiably fear the return of Shiite death squads more than they fear ISIS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Shiite militiamen killed 70 people at a Sunni mosque in Diyala province on September 22nd, a reporter for the Guardian embedded with a group of militiamen in Diyala reported, "For these men, the Sunnis as a whole are the enemy, regardless of whether they are ISIS supporters or not." One militiaman told theGuardian that they do not kill women, children or old people, implying that adult men are a different story, but another told the Guardian, "When I liberate an area from ISIS, why do I have to give it back to them? Either I erase it or settle Shia in it." Another added, "If it's for me, I will start cleansing Baghdad from today." </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What all the forces resisting ISIS really need from the U.S. and its allies is to call off the U.S.-backed Iraqi government's death squads, and to end our funding, arming and support for ISIS' allies in Syria. Instead Congress has voted to provide more weapons and training to jihadis in Syria. Meanwhile the U.S. bombing campaign is enhancing ISIS' prestige, helping it to attract an estimated 6,000 new recruits since August. If the goal of U.S. policy was to make a dire situation worse for the people of Syria and Iraq, it's hard to see how we could do a better job of it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Americans, this campaign brings together many of the familiar themes of the history of U.S. military expansion since the end of the Cold War, and it raises many of the same questions and problems. U.S. officials are evidently encouraged by similarities to the 1991 First Gulf War, a model they revere but have failed to replicate: an unpopular enemy; a limited objective; domestic political support; a broad international coalition to do the fighting and pay for it; and the promise of "victory" over a villainous enemy to win the acclaim of a grateful world. But the two campaigns have other things in common that should give us pause.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like the current bombing campaign, the short-lived victory over Iraq in 1991, which ultimately led to the present crisis, was designed with another, distinctly political, purpose in mind: to save the Cold War U.S. military from the threat of substantial disarmament. On the basis of that war, U.S. officials adapted their Cold War military machine from the nominally defensive purpose that had justified building it in the first place to a force that aspired to "full-spectrum dominance" of the entire planet, based on huge investments in surveillance and weapons technology. But instead of being a force for stability and security as U.S. leaders claim, the U.S. post-Cold War military has achieved the exact opposite, depriving millions of people in dozens of countries of whatever stability and security they previously enjoyed, at the cost of more than $10 trillion dollars to U.S. tax-payers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In December 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, former senior officials Robert McNamara and Lawrence Korb testified to the Senate Budget Committee that the military budget could safely be cut in half over 10 years to leave us with what would now be a $267 billion military budget after adjusting for inflation. In the summer of 1990, Congress began debating serious cuts in the military budget.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, after receiving the infamous "green light" from U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie. Whatever Glaspie's orders or intentions, Kuwait certainly had a green light from the U.S. to play hardball with Iraq over disputed territory, oilfields and OPEC production quotas, with the assurance that the U.S. would come to its rescue if this provoked a war with Iraq. Sure enough, U.S. aircraft carriers were steaming towards Kuwait and Iraq within hours of the Iraqi invasion, and the predicament of the post-Cold War U.S. military influenced what followed as much as that of Kuwait, which, like the plight of the Yazidis, was opportunistically highlighted and exaggerated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While most Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a chance for peace, many U.S. officials saw it as a new chance for war. Pentagon adviser Michael Mandelbaum told the New York Times, "For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III". Heightened inter-service rivalries shaped the war plan, as Lawrence Korb told the Washington Post, "Even the reserves are scheduled to be sent… The reserve lobby recognized that their future funding may be jeopardized if their units do not get involved." And President Bush rejected Iraqi offers to withdraw from Kuwait and avoid the war that would save the U.S. military industrial complex.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Following Bush's model, Obama's coalition-building gives his war a veneer of legitimacy, but it will also open up new markets for U.S. weapons makers. In 1991, after a bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and inflicted destruction that a UN report called "near-apocalyptic", U.S. planes and pilots were dispatched straight to the Paris Air Show to drum up new business for U.S. weapons makers. The next two years set new records for U.S. arms exports, and the U.S. has maintained a 40% share ofglobal arms exports ever since. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The post-Cold War U.S. military budget has never fallen below its Cold War baseline of an inflation-adjusted $390 billion. At $600 billion it is higher today than at the peak of the Vietnam War or the Reagan arms build-up. Giving credit where credit is due for its long-term effect on global military spending, the First Gulf War may have been the most expensive war ever fought.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similar interests are at work today. All four major U.S. weapons makers have hit all-time highs on the stock market since the bombing began: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and, not least, General Dynamics, the family firm of Chicago's Crown family, who have bankrolled much of Barack Obama's political career.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A headline in Fortune magazine on September 13th crowed: "The war on ISIS already has a winner: the defense industry." The article reported, "…defense analysts are pointing to a pair of sure-bet paydays from the new campaign: for those making and maintaining the aircraft, manned and unmanned, that will swarm the skies over the region, and for those producing the missiles and munitions that will arm them." It listed Hellfire missile maker Lockheed Martin, Tomahawk cruise-missile maker Raytheon and munitions maker General Dynamics as well-positioned "to reap the biggest windfall." </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the President gets his way, the Third Gulf War, like the First, will forestall serious cuts in the U.S. military budget or any reorientation of the militarized U.S. economy to address the pressing needs of the American public. Any small reduction in weapons sales to the Pentagon will be balanced by the marketing value of a high-tech bombing campaign to generate a surge in U.S. weapons exports, as in the 1990s, adding fuel to a world on fire.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another disquieting parallel between 1990 and 2014 is that Saddam Hussein and ISIS were both creations of the CIA. These monsters are undoubtedly "our" monsters. What does it say about our leaders that they reserve their most self-righteous fury for those who do their dirty work but then turn to bite the hand that feeds them, a select club that also includes Manuel Noriega and Osama Bin-Laden?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CIA hired 22-year-old Saddam Hussein in 1959 to assassinate General Qasim, the revolutionary leader who overthrew the Western-backed Iraqi monarchy in 1958. The plot failed and the CIA whisked Hussein to safety in Beirut, wounded in the leg by one of his fellow assassins, then to Cairo, where he was a regular visitor at the U.S. Embassy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With CIA support, the Baath Party overthrew and killed Qasim in 1963, and Hussein rose through its ranks to become President of Iraq. The U.S. and other Western allies supplied him with weapons to wage war with Iran, including chemical weapons and DIA satellite intelligence to target them. Two months after Hussein used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurdish villages, Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad to negotiate closer relations and reopen the U.S. Embassy. Only when Hussein invaded U.S. ally Kuwait did he become the new bete noir of U.S. propaganda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. and its allies have spent 3 years deploying and arming proxy forces to overthrow the government of Syria: flying in weapons and jihadis from Libya in unmarked NATO planes; setting up command centersand training camps in Jordan, Turkey and now Saudi Arabia; throwing open the Turkish border to flood Syria with special forces, jihadis and weapons from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Balkans and elsewhere; cynically scheming to undermine the Annan peace plan in 2012; and rejecting abundant evidence that U.S. proxies in Syria were more brutal and dangerous than the government they were sacrificing the people of Syria to overthrow. Now that the propaganda bubble has burst in President Obama's face, ISIS has become America's new bete noir, or should we say "the new Saddam Hussein"? </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The huge U.S. investment in its tools of violence creates dangerous corrupting influences on the policy process in Washington, but it also comes with a high cost when it comes to dealing with the problems it creates in the real world. As a U.S. general famously remarked, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Neoconservative U.S. foreign policy is, by definition, a hammer in search of nails. But, to state the obvious, every problem is not a nail. The world has real problems that our corrupt, militarized government lacks the moral, diplomatic and intellectual resources to solve, and more hammering can only make things worse.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But even after President Obama himself declared that there is "no American military solution" to the problems the U.S. and its allies have caused in Iraq and Syria, he promptly reverted to the default option: bombing. When you only have one tool, the pressure to "do something" means only one thing: bombing to prevent ethnic cleansing, but which actually triggered ethnic cleansing, in Kosovo; bombing to restore warlords to power in Afghanistan and flood our own streets with heroin; bombing to destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan; bombing to support jihadi militias and plunge Libya into chaos; bombing to push Yemen to the verge of disintegration; bombing to plunge Somalia back into chaos every time it tries to pick itself up off the floor; and bombing to shock and awe Iraq into an endless state of war.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After 94,000 U.S. air strikes since 2001 have spread chaos and violence to country after country, our morally, legally and intellectually bankrupt leaders still have only one response: more bombing. Substituting an addiction to billion-dollar bombers for a real foreign policy based on the American public's interest in peace and international cooperation leaves them without real tools to fix the damage they've done. They rummage around in their embarrassingly limited tool-box, and like Monty Python's Spam-loving Vikings, all they can come up with is: bombing, bombing, bombing, bombing and bombing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1928, when world leaders drafted and signed the Treaty for the Renunciation of War, or the Kellogg Briand Pact, they renounced "war as an instrument of national policy," and then hung German leaders for violating it. The U.N. Charter, the enduring international vision and legacy of President Roosevelt, expanded that commitment to peace and international law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since 1990, the U.S. has restored war as an instrument of national policy, on the myopic and arrogant presumption that the collapse of its strategic enemy would permit it to reshape the world through the illegal threat and use of overwhelming and deadly violence. To overcome the political and legal obstacles toits policy of aggression, the U.S. has developed a sophisticated strategy of "information warfare" to demonize its enemies and politically justify its aggression. It has adopted the techniques of Hollywood and the advertising industry to create false narratives and choices, appealing to fear, racism and the worst aspects of human nature, while abusing and manipulating the best instincts of young Americans who volunteer to serve their country: their humanity, their courage to defend the downtrodden and their belief in freedom, justice and democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We must somehow find the political will to speak truth to power and to elect and empower new American leaders who will make a historic recommitment to peace, disarmament, diplomacy and the rule of law. There are things that we can all do to make our voices heard: </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">- Work with Peace Action, United For Peace and Justice, Win Without War, Veterans For Peace,Progressive Democrats of America, the Green Party, RootsAction, or whichever peace movement groups are the best fit for you. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">*</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">- Call your Representatives' staffers before and after they vote on critical war and peace issues. Check Peace Action's Congressional Voting Records to see how your Reps have voted in the past, pay attention to how they vote in future and start holding them accountable. Some progressive Democrats take brave stands for peace, but get little recognition for it, so learn to tell the difference between a real peacemaker and a warmonger, Democratic or Republican. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as Iraqis deserve better than a choice between ISIS and Shiite death squads, you don't have to settle for a choice between war criminals with different letters after their names. But you can't elect real peacemakers if you can't tell the difference. If you made a mistake with Obama, you're not alone. Have you met the Nobel Committee? But please, don't get fooled again!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy -- Continued Under Obama -- Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies September 10, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Editor's note: On Wednesday night President Barack Obama gave a nationally televised address in which he vowed that the United States would "degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3 Ways America Enables Slaughter in Gaza</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies August 20, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American debate on the hundreds of civilian deaths in Gaza and the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict is polarized between feelings of sympathy with civilian victims on either side and mutual vilification of the Likud-led government of Israel and the Hamas-led government in Gaza. But it may be more constructive for Americans to think about the role that the U.S. government plays in perpetuating this never-ending and heart-rending conflict.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Victory of Popular Resistance In Occupied Iraq</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies June 30, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tom Hayden has described the public debate in the United States over the popular uprising in Iraq as a "battle over memory." But few Americans have ever accepted the enormity of U.S. aggression and other war crimes in Iraq, so this debate is largely taking place in a parallel universe, divorced from the reality of what our government and our armed forces have done to the people of Iraq. For the second time in just over a decade, Iraqis find themselves abandoned and alone in their quest for justice, and for the rights that are theoretically guaranteed to them and to all human beings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We Should Slice the Pentagon Budget - It Would Save Trillions and Rescue America</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies May 13, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Next week, Congress will begin debate on a roughly $601 billion Pentagon budget for FY2015. Before we let this pass unchallenged, let's take a few minutes to put it in some historical perspective.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fiery Chaos in Odessa: 42 Perish After Ukrainians Launch Waco-Like Assault</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies May 05, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The death toll in Odessa stands at 42 people killed, most of them burned to death or suffocated by smoke inhalation in the inferno at the Trade Unions House. There is no dispute over who were the victims and who were their killers. The victims were pro-Russian protesters who had occupied the building. The attackers who set fire to it with petrol bombs were members of Right Sector, the ultra-Nationalist strike force of the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in February. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies April 28, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the Bush years, people all over the world were horrified by America's aggression, human rights abuses and militarism. By 2008, only one in three people around the world approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders. The election of President Obama broadcast his message of hope and change far beyond U.S. shores, and Gallup's 2009 U.S.-Global Leadership Project (USGLP) recorded a sharp rise in global public approval of U.S. leadership to 49 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America's Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies April 08, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soon after the 2004 U.S. coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, I heard Aristide's lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He began his talk with a riddle: "Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?" The answer: "Because there is no U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C." This introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies March 04, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We Need To End the Disastrous Failure Of The War On Terror</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies February 03, 2014</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twelve years into America's "war on terror," it is time to admit that it has failed catastrophically, unleashing violence, war and instability in an "arc of terror" stretching from West Africa to the Himalayas and beyond. If we examine the pretext for all this chaos, that it could possibly be a legitimate or effective response to terrorism, it quickly becomes clear that it has been the exact opposite, fueling a global explosion of terrorism and a historic breakdown of law and order.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Price of America Having the Greatest Military in the World? It's Destroying the Country</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies October 21, 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The idea of U.S. "national security" seems inextricably entangled with the notion of "military supremacy." Over the past 15 years, this has served to rationalize the most expensive unilateral military build-up in history. But there is no evidence that having the most expensive and destructive military forces makes Americans safer than people in other countries, nor that restoring a more balanced military posture would leave us vulnerable to dangers we are currently protected from. Many countries with smaller military forces do a better job of protecting their people by avoiding the hostility that is generated by U.S. imperialism, aggression and other war crimes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, successful diplomacy over Syria's chemical weapons has demonstrated that diplomacy within the framework of international law can be a more effective way of dealing with problems than the illegal threat or use of military force. Our government claims that its threat of force led to the success of diplomacy in Syria, but that's not really what happened. It was only when the sleeping giant of American democracy awoke from its long slumber and pried the cruise missiles from our leaders' trigger fingers that they grudgingly accepted "diplomacy as a last resort." For once in a very long while, our political system worked the way it's supposed to: the public made its views clear to our representatives in Congress, and they listened. We saved our leaders from the consequences of their own criminality, and their efforts to sell a propaganda narrative that turns that on its head is a sad reflection on their disdain for democracy and the rule of law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For most of our history, Americans never dreamt of global military supremacy. At the turn of the 20th century, even as the U.S. waged a genocidal war that probably killed a million Filipinos, American diplomats played key roles in the Hague Peace Conferences and the establishment of international courts, eager to adapt American concepts of democracy and justice to the international arena to develop alternatives to war and militarism. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In response to the horrors of the First World War, an international social movement demanded the abolition of war. In 1928, the U.S. government responded by negotiating the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, in which all major powers renounced "war as an instrument of national policy." The treaty failed to prevent the Second World War, but it provided the legal basis for the convictions of German leaders at Nuremberg for the crime of aggression. And it is still in force, supported by subsequent treaties like the UN Charter and conventions against genocide, torture and other war crimes, under which senior U.S. officials must also eventually face justice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The allied defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War was not the result of American military supremacy, but of an alliance across ideological lines with imperial Britain and the communist Soviet Union, based on mutual trust, vigorous diplomacy and the recognition of a common existential threat. Most Americans believed at the time that the war would lead to a renewed international commitment to peace and disarmament, not to an American bid for military supremacy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American, British and Soviet leaders agreed that their common interests required what Roosevelt called "a permanent structure of peace" after the war, through the United Nations and continued great power diplomacy. The prohibition against the threat or use of force is a key provision of the UN Charter. But Roosevelt's death deprived America of his vision and personal diplomatic skills just as the complexities of the post-war world began to rear their head. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Truman mistrusted the Soviets and never shared Roosevelt's commitment to work with them in a spirit of mutual respect. He quickly fell under the influence of hawkish advisers like his Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy, Ambassador Harriman and Navy Secretary Forrestal, and he condemned the Russians harshly at every turn during negotiations on the contours of the post-war world. Truman embraced Churchill's self-fulfilling declaration of an "iron curtain" across Europe and his dark view of America's wartime ally as a potential aggressor in the mold of Nazi Germany.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What emboldened the former Senator from Missouri to squander the fruits of Roosevelt's astute diplomacy? In great part, it was "the bomb." The U.S. monopoly on atomic weapons in the late 1940s gave rise to a newly aggressive posture in U.S. foreign policy, including desperate calls to destroy the Soviet Union in a massive nuclear holocaust before it could develop its own nuclear deterrent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fortunately for all of us, wiser heads prevailed and a nuclear war was avoided. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and wartime American and British military leaders warned that attacking the U.S.S.R. would unleash an even more terrible war than the one the world had just survived. U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Eisenhower made an early venture into politics with a speech in St. Louis, saying, "I decry loose and sometimes gloating talk about the high degree of security implicit in a weapon that might destroy millions overnight… Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many Americans accepted their government's claims that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shortened the war with Japan and saved American lives, but the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, "Japan would have surrendered, even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." In fact, Japan's vital supply lines were cut and it was already suing for peace. The main sticking point was the continued rule of Emperor Hirohito, which the allies eventually conceded in any case. American leaders from former President Hoover to future President Eisenhower to military intelligence chief General Carter Clarke all opposed using the bomb as barbaric and unnecessary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But America's monopoly on nuclear weapons transformed U.S. foreign policy after the war. Even though our leaders have never found any practical way to realize the mirage of omnipotence conjured up by these weapons, they gave them a false sense of ultimate power in a fluid and uncertain post-war world. Cooperation with the Soviets was no longer imperative, because, in the last resort, we had the bomb and they did not. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. and U.K. could not prevent most of the countries of Eastern Europe from falling into the Soviet political and economic orbit once they were liberated by the Red Army and communist resistance forces, any more than the Russians could bring their communist allies to power in Western-occupied France, Italy or Greece. But the U.S. nuclear monopoly encouraged Truman to take a hard line. The Truman Doctrine committed the U.S. to militarily oppose Soviet influence across the globe in a long ideological struggle.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the Soviets developed their own nuclear arsenal, the U.S. invested trillions of dollars and vast human resources in an unrestrained technological arms race. American warplanes and tanks generally proved superior to Soviet ones in proxy wars around the world, but this was irrelevant to the outcome of guerrilla wars, where the AK-47 became the weapon of choice and a symbol of popular resistance to Western imperialism. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, excluded and freed from the tyranny of military production, invested all their resources in civilian technology and soon produced better cars and home electronics than either of the "superpowers."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The almost unbelievable record of American militarism since 1945 is that, despite the most sustained and expensive military build-up in the history of the world and the tragic annihilation of millions of people, the United States has not won a single major war. After overreaching in Korea, bringing China into the war and devastating North and South Korea, it was forced to settle for a ceasefire on the original border. At least 3 million Vietnamese and 57,000 Americans paid with their lives for the folly of the American War in Vietnam. Proxy and covert wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of South-East Asia have been just as bloody but no more successful. America's only real military successes have been limited campaigns to restore friendly regimes in three small strategic outposts: Grenada; Panama; and Kuwait.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Surveying the ruins of U.S. policy at the end of the American War in Vietnam, Richard Barnet put his finger on the irony of America's unique place in world history. He wrote, "at the very moment the number one nation has perfected the science of killing, it has become an impractical instrument of political domination."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the lessons of Vietnam were gradually eroded by a revival of U.S. militarism. George Bush Senior played a critical role as Director of the CIA (1976-7) and the Council on Foreign Relations (1977-9) and then as Vice President and President. After covert wars in Angola, Afghanistan and Central America, and invasions of Grenada and Panama, Bush refused Iraq's offers to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait in 1991 and instead ordered the massacre of at least 25,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Bush rejoiced, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fall of the U.S.S.R. was a critical factor in U.S. military expansion in the Middle East. As Pentagon adviser Michael Mandelbaum said in 1991, "For the first time in 40 years we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III." The "peace dividend" Americans expected at the end of the Cold War was trumped by a "power dividend," as policy-makers exploited the fall of the Soviet Union to project U.S. military power around the world. New interventionist doctrines of "reassurance", "humanitarian intervention", "responsibility to protect", "information warfare" and "preemption" have served as political cover for violating the UN Charter's prohibition on the threat or use of force, culminating in the travesty of Barack Obama's speech justifying war as he accepted the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since Vietnam, we have spent at least another $17 trillion on war and preparations for war - our entire national debt - and killed millions more of our fellow human beings. Watching General Giap's funeral in Hanoi as I write this today, I have to ask, "What have we learned?" Our generals have learned how to wage war in other countries with fewer American casualties by using disproportionate violence that kills more civilians than combatants. This has made war less painful for Americans, but it only underlines its futility and barbarism. No American general of this generation will be buried with the outpouring of genuine public gratitude and grief we just saw in Hanoi.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now we have spent 12 years at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia (along with covert operations across the entire globe, from Sweden to the Philippines to Colombia). We have brought death, injury, devastation and chaos to hundreds of millions more people, with no end in sight as the "Long War" keeps spreading from country to country. Nowhere have our leaders achieved their original stated intentions to reduce terrorism, prevent weapons proliferation or establish democracy. Their increasingly desperate rationalizations for a murderous, out-of-control policy, repeated ad nauseam by a craven corporate propaganda system, can barely disguise their humiliation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Americans in the late 1940s who were desperate to destroy the U.S.S.R. in a "preemptive" nuclear war, some Americans today may still not understand why our military supremacy cannot bring us political power over enemies with fewer resources and inferior weapons. But, as Eisenhower and other American war leaders understood only too well, the use of force is a blunt and brutal instrument, and more powerful weapons are only more powerful, not magical. The use of force is always destructive, not constructive, and being killed or maimed by shrapnel and high explosives is no cleaner or kinder because missiles are more expensive or more sophisticated. Political power is something quite different, requiring popular support and legitimacy and policies that actually solve problems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So military supremacy is not a trump card to achieve political objectives; the use of force is inherently destructive; and war nearly always causes more problems than it solves. Killing people to save them from an oppressive government is an absurdity, and "regime change" is generally a euphemism for "regime destruction," with no ability to ensure that what comes after will be better, especially once the violence and chaos of war are added to the problems that led to it in the first place.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Norwegian General Robert Mood led the UN monitors sent to Syria to oversee the failed ceasefire in 2012. A year later, amid calls for Western military intervention, he reflected, "It is fairly easy to use the military tool, because, when you launch the military tool in classical interventions, something will happen and there will be results. The problem is that the results are almost all the time different than the political results you were aiming for when you decided to launch it. So the other position, arguing that it is not the role of the international community, neither coalitions of the willing nor the UN Security Council for that matter, to change governments inside a country, is also a position that should be respected…" </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Threatening the use of force while hoping not to have to use it may seem like a less painful way for our leaders to impose their will on other countries, but in practice this doesn't work very well either. It forces both sides into positions from which neither can afford to back down, putting the credibility of our military supremacy on the line over every crisis around the world. This has turned manufactured disputes over non-existent weapons into a choice between war and political humiliation for American leaders, as we saw with Iraq and, incredibly, are now going through all over again with Iran. There is great wisdom in the UN Charter's prohibition on the threat as well as on the use of force, because the one leads so predictably to the other.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite nearly bankrupting our country, military supremacy remains an expensive national ego-trip in search of a constructive purpose. Countries that are not cursed with military supremacy have to settle their differences by other means, notably by diplomacy within the rule of international law. As we have found out over Syria, this is not by any means a worse option, and it offers us a way forward to life after militarism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The victory of democracy in America's debate over Syria is a small but significant step in the right direction. Organizing and public outrage transformed formerly passive public opposition to war and militarism into effective action to prevent U.S. aggression. Now we must tap into the same combination of public sentiment and effective political organizing to actually bring peace to Syria, to restore civilized relations with Iran and to finally turn the tide on the largest, most wasteful and dangerous unilateral military build-up in the history of the world. This could be an important turning point, but that will be up to us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9 Ways America Has Fueled the Bloody Civil War in Syria</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies September 04, 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Obama's threats against Syria are framed by the carefully crafted image of a responsible superpower reluctantly drawn into a horrific conflict caused by others. But the reality is very different. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more than two years, U.S. policy has quietly fueled the escalation of the conflict in Syria and undermined every effort to bring the Syrian people the ceasefire and peaceful political transition they need and want. Whoever is directly responsible for hundreds of deaths in the latest alleged chemical weapons incident, the critical covert and diplomatic role the United States has played in a war that has killed at least 100,000 people means that their blood is also on our hands.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Haytham Manna, a leader of the National Coordinating Body for Democratic Change (NCB) in Syria recently told Le Vif, the largest French language news magazine in Belgium, "The Americans have cheated. Two or three times they have withdrawn at the very moment that an agreement was in the works… Everything is possible but that will depend mainly on the Americans. The French are content to follow. A political solution is the only one that could save Syria."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, if Manna is correct, we Americans have played a decisive role at the critical moments for war or peace in Syria, including the one we are now confronting. If it comes as a surprise to you as an American that you are responsible for the horrific nightmare taking place in Syria, please review the well-documented record of what has been done in your name, albeit secretly and without your knowledge in many cases:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1) As protests spread through the Arab world in 2011, the mostly leftist groups who organized the Arab Spring protests in Syria formed the NCB to coordinate peaceful protests and resistance to government repression. They agreed, and they still agree, on three basic principles: non-violence; non-sectarianism; and no foreign military intervention. But the U.S. and its allies marginalized the NCB, formed an unrepresentative "Syrian National Council" in Turkey as a government-in-exile and recruited, armed and trained violent armed groups to pursue regime change in Syria. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2) The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar began flying in fighters, weapons and equipment to turn the Syrian Spring into a bloody civil war. Once they had overthrown the government of Libya, at the cost of 25,000 to 50,000 lives, they began adapting the same strategy to Syria, despite knowing full well that this would be a much more drawn-out, destructive and bloody war.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3) Even as a Qatari-funded YouGov poll in December 2011 found that 55% of Syrians still supported their government, unmarked NATO planes were flying fighters and weapons from Libya to the "Free Syrian Army" base at Iskanderum in Turkey. British and French special forces were training FSA recruits, while the CIA and US special forces provided communications equipment and intelligence, as in Libya. Retired CIA officer Philip Giraldi concluded, "Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels who are armed, trained and financed by foreign governments are more true than false."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4) Over the past two years, we have learned more about who is doing what in Syria. Anti-government sources acknowledged in June 2013 that 2,100 of the 16,700 rebel fighters killed so far in Syria were foreigners, while only 145 of 41,600 loyalists killed in action were foreign Hezbollah members.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5) Journalists in the Balkans have reported that wealthy Gulf Arab paymasters fund hundreds of hardened mercenaries from Croatia and elsewhere, who earn up to $2,000 per day as rebel snipers and special forces in Syria. Saudi Arabia has sent convicts to fight in Syria as an alternative to prison and funded shipments of weapons from Croatia to Jordan. Qatar has spent $3 billion to pay rebel fighters and ship at least 70 planeloads of weapons via Turkey. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6) On the diplomatic front, as Haytham Manna told Le Vif, the United States has played an equally insidious role. As Kofi Annan launched his peace plan in April 2012, the U.S. and its Western and Arab monarchist allies made sure that their Syrian proxies would not comply with the ceasefire by pledging unconditional political support, backed up by more weapons and generous funding.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7) The US joined France and its other allies at three Orwellian "Friends of Syria" meetings to launch what French officials referred to as a "Plan B", to escalate the war and undermine the Annan peace plan. At the second Friends of Syria meeting, nine days before Annan's ceasefire was due to take effect, the U.S and its allies agreed to provide funds for the Free Syrian Army to pay its fighters, while Qatar and Saudi Arabia pledged to increase their supply of weapons. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8) Annan finally assembled all the permanent members of the Security Council and other governments involved in the war in Syria in Geneva at the end of June 2012. The Western powers briefly dropped their previously non-negotiable demand to remove President Assad as the first step in a political transition, so that all sides could finally sign on to the Annan plan. But then the U.S. and its allies rejected a UN Security Council resolution to codify the agreement and revived their previous demands for Assad's removal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9) In May 2013, after tens of thousands more Syrians had been killed, Secretary Kerry finally went to Moscow and agreed to renew the peace process begun in Geneva in June 2012. But since May, the United States has once again reneged on the Geneva agreement and chosen to escalate the war even further, by providing direct weapons shipments and now missile strikes to support its proxies in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, far from being reluctantly dragged into a terrible conflict not of its own making, the United States and its allies have in fact followed a quite coherent policy of regime change, modeled roughly on their successful overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011. The main difference has been the absence of foreign air support for the Syrian rebels. In Libya, NATO conducted 7,700 air strikes, demolishing Libya's air defenses in the early stages of the campaign and thereafter bombing at will throughout the country. The fact that Syria possesses a far more extensive, modern, Russian-built air defense system has successfully deterred the West and its Arab royalist allies from following the same strategy in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Until now that is. The somewhat arbitrary "red line" regarding chemical weapons is serving as a pretext to launch missile strikes, degrade Syria's air defenses and expose it to future air strikes. While President Obama tries to assuage liberals with promises of limited and proportionate strikes, there has been a steady parade of hawkish Republicans emerging from closed door meetings at the White House reassured that, as theGuardian wrote on Tuesday, this is indeed "part of a broader strategy to topple Bashar al-Assad."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, Obama admitted in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic in March 2012 that his entire assault on Syria is itself part of a broader strategy to isolate Iran by destroying its strongest Arab ally. When asked what more the U.S. could do to topple Assad, Obama laughed and said, "Well, nothing that I can tell you, because your classified clearance isn't good enough."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But enough details have now emerged of the true contours of this policy to make his crocodile tears for alleged nerve agent victims seem grotesque. The atrocious position in which he has placed the American public in whose name he acts should spur outrage, at a political class who connive in such cynical and murderous policies; at commercial media who laugh all the way to the bank as they misinform and mislead us; and yes, at ourselves for being patsies for serial aggression and genocide, in Vietnam, Iraq and now Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To paraphrase Mr. Obama speaking in Sweden on Wednesday, the world set a "red line" when the UN Charter prohibited the use of military force except in self defense or in legitimate collective security operations mandated by the UN Security Council. The US Senate set a "red line" when it ratified the UN Charter by 89 votes to 2. As Obama said, "The international community's credibility is on the line, and America and Congress's credibility is on the line because we give lip service to the notion that these international norms are important." And when we are talking about war and peace, it is not just our credibility that is on the line, but the very nature of the world that we live in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So please take a few minutes and call your "Representatives" in Congress to insist that they vote "No" on the authorization of U.S. aggression against Syria. Ask them instead to pass a resolution recommitting the United States to the June 2012 Geneva peace plan, which starts with a ceasefire by all parties to the conflict, including the United States. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syria: Where the Obama Doctrine of Covert War Spectacularly Backfired</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nicolas J. S. Davies AlterNet Nicolas J. S. Davies June 25, 2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Barack Obama's rise to power in 2008 raised fundamental questions about the duty of a newly-elected government in a country that has been engaged in war crimes, from aggression against other countries to systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions and human rights laws.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Obama took office, an Eminent Jurists Panel convened by the International Commission of Jurists and headed...</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div>