Subjects Archives: War

On the night of 14 August 1791, enslaved Africans gathered in the Bois Caïman forest and planned the revolt that would begin the Haitian Revolution. Last week, on the 230th anniversary of this meeting, Haiti was hit by an earthquake that has upturned the lives of more than a million people.

People frequently refer to Colombia as “the coffee-growing country,” due to its high volume of coffee exports, but in recent years Colombia has found itself in headlines for a different commodity.

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

Six Principles for an Increasingly Authoritarian Age.

On Sunday, 15 August, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled his country for Uzbekistan. He left behind a capital city, Kabul, which had already fallen into the hands of the advancing Taliban forces.

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

The catch-phrases “transnational criminal organizations,” “humanitarian assistance” and even “disaster relief operations” are worn-out euphemisms for the neo-colonial presence of the U.S. Empire and its European allies in Guyana and throughout the region.

There are too many careers and too much money tied to American power projection. So expect it to shift, not recede from the stage.

The U.S. has been defeated today in Afghanistan not by a super power with an advanced military, but by a rag-tag army of fanatical locals who perfected and consolidated their fanaticism under U.S., Saudi and Pakistani tutelage in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.

The dog-whistle calls of “Freedom for Cuba” that reverberated round the world on 11 July, emanating from a mix of forces in Cuba, which were carefully manipulated and crafted by the CIA and U.S. anti-Cuban forces abroad, shed a great deal of light not only on U.S. foreign policy hypocrisy but on left-wing hypocrisy and impotence, both here in Ireland and elsewhere.

Media reports from the U.S. this week–regurgitated by the European press–highlighted concerns that China is embarking on a massive scale-up of underground silos for launching nuclear weapons.

Survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan have a “profound role” to play in catastrophes such as the coronavirus pandemic, a leading American psychohistorian renowned for his studies of people under stress told Kyodo News in a recent interview.

On Wednesday afternoon, Israeli forces shot and killed 11-year-old Mohammed al-Alami in his father’s car, as the family were on their way home from grocery shopping. The next day at Mohammed’s funeral, Israeli soldiers attacked the procession, killing 20-year-old Shawkat Awad.

Diverse international groups along with the U.S. State Department have taken notice of Rodrigo Duterte’s record of killings and wanton defiance of universal norms of justice. Duterte’s regime might claim to honor the right to life, liberty, and security of persons guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and other Covenants; but its practice consistently defiles those norms. Mass media and internet platforms cannot keep up with the regime’s punitive outrages.

The 20th century muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair once opined that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

A new open-source study concludes that Syrian insurgents carried out the Ghouta sarin chemical attack in August 2013. The explosive findings add to a growing body of public evidence that undermines U.S.-led efforts to blame the Syrian government, which almost led to U.S. military intervention.

Ben & Jerry’s decision to halt its operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem has pro-Israel editors working overtime.

When the American journalist, I.F. Stone, published The Hidden History of the Korean War at the height of the military conflict in 1952, its message did not find a warm welcome at home.

Don’t speak ill of the dead, they say, but if I were to choose candidates for a Hall of Evil Fame, I’d have to ignore such advice; the late Donald Rumsfeld would be close to the top of my list.

Comments by the former British ambassador to Syria came hours after the chairwoman of the Syrian mission to the OPCW said the U.S. and its allies had lowered the status of the international watchdog, and turned it into a political tool to level baseless accusations against Damascus and exert pressure on it.