Pentagon

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Even before some whistleblowers among the generals went to the Atlantic magazine with their complaints that Trump disrespected US war dead, the president was in trouble with the military. I suspect that yesterday’s news will have caused Trump’s standing with the military to plummet further. A new opinion poll from […]

Donald Trump

What was the Battle of Belleau Woods, the Slain Marines at which Trump called “Losers” and “Suckers”?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic reported yesterday on what he was told by four members of Trump’s entourage about the president’s 2018 visit to France. He had been scheduled to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, but it was raining and he made excuses. Goldberg’s sources told him that […]

Afghanistan

US punishes International Criminal Court for investigating potential war crimes in Afghanistan

The Conversation

By Susan M. Akram | The Trump administration has sought to weaken or abandon various international agencies since 2016. Now it’s taking aim at the International Criminal Court, a global tribunal that investigates and prosecutes war crimes, torture and genocide. Claiming the ICC’s investigation into alleged war crimes by U.S. forces in Afghanistan poses a […]

Artificial Intelligence

Do Robot Generals dream of Deceased Humans?

Michael T. Klare

( Tomdispatch.com ) – With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, […]

Pentagon

Cluster bombs once against Vietnamese people and still in use today

Anne-Ruth Wertheim

( Joop) – On 4 March 1971 our train pulled in to Paris’s Gare du Nord station. My then husband Ab van Kammen and I were going to spend a few days in the city. We had left our three daughters with various friends, packed our suitcases and caught the train. It would not just […]

Epidemics

Trump is making us Sick, and Unsafe: Covid Infection Rate Triples in US Military

Tomdispatch

By Andrea Mazzarino | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21st edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past […]

Inequality

Defund the Bloated U.S. Military

contributors

By Eric Stoner | – ( The Progressive) – The bold call by Black Lives Matter activists to defund police has profoundly reshaped the national conversation, but it is only the start of the movement’s sweeping vision for public safety. To reduce our reliance on policing and prisons, racial justice leaders are urging that resources […]

Donald Trump

Killing Democracy in America: The Military-Industrial Complex and Forever Wars as our other Pandemic

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – The phrase “thinking about the unthinkable” has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that’s been rolling out in far slower […]

Bush

First the Nat’l Security State Surged Baghdad, now it is Surging Portland and Seattle

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – USA Today’s headline went, “Mayors see broken trust, political agenda in Trump’s surge of federal officers to US cities.” Surge? For those of us old enough to remember George W. Bush’s Iraq War, the use of the word “surge” to describe Federal agents sent into Democratic cities to break heads […]