AlterNet

Last Thursday [...] the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.'s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years. [more]

"A big reason for the new-found intimacy is the Indian government's desire to solidify its friendship with the United States. Indian officials have been bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with the pro-Israel lobby in Washington in order to work Congress and to gain access to the neoconservatives who dominate the Bush administration's foreign policy." [more]

"The 288 American soldiers and countless Iraqis who have since died in a pointless, bloody war will not be mentioned, nor will the administration's own responsibility in their deaths. Of all the lies this administration has told its people, one false promise resonated most deeply with frightened Americans — the promise that a war with Iraq would make us safer." [more]

"Like other examples of doublespeak, the concept of 'shock and awe' enables its users to symbolically reconcile two contradictory ideas. On the one hand, its theorists use the term to plan massive uses of deadly force. On the other hand, its focus on the psychological effect of that force makes it possible to use the term while distancing audiences from direct contemplation of the human suffering that force creates." [more]

"Complicating the humanitarian crisis has been a behind the scenes international struggle against the Bush administration's militarization of humanitarian aid." [more]

"Given how continually Bush plays the fear card, we might acknowledge that Americans have some reasons for fear. And then make clear that reckless zealotry and a willingness to make entire populations expendable does nothing to bring real security." [more]

"One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors — conceptual structures like those we have been describing. When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored." [more]

"In an exhilarating expression of the anti-war movement's profound decentralization and spontaneity, peaceful demonstrators filled the streets, marching in whatever direction they could. It was the best anti-war protest yet, everyone agreed. Who needed to stand still in the cold and listen to the (at least 30) boring speeches, when so much of the city was one enormous, intoxicating, unpredictable protest march?" [more]

"It was only the remarkable restraint of protesters accustomed to obeying the law — a diverse array of families from the boroughs, twenty-something Manhattanites, and retired couples from Westchester — that prevented the day of peaceful dissent from turning into a riot." [more]

"The only reason — the only reason — that Congressional Democrats this past week started speaking out against invasion, in more than their previously token numbers, is because they have been deluged with phone calls, faxes, and e-mails expressing the public's opposition. Polls show widespread doubt. Congressional office intake valves, a measure of the people passionate enough to contact their public officials, has been running more than 90 percent against the planned invasion. And volume has been high." [more]

"After scores of studies costing more than $150 million, a definitive cause for Gulf War Illness has yet to be announced. Investigators and researchers have targeted a number of things, including: the unproven vaccines and drugs our troops were forced to take; the U.S. Depleted Uranium Munitions used against Iraqi armor that exposed our soldiers to radiation; pollution from the oil-well fires; local diseases; even the clouds that blew over our troops when captured Iraqi chemical-warfare weaponry was destroyed by Army engineers." [more]

"The document argued that the core assumption guiding U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century should be the need to establish permanent U.S. dominance over virtually all of Eurasia. It envisioned a world in which U.S. military intervention would become 'a constant fixture' of the geo-political landscape. [T]hrough the nineties, the two authors and their boss, then-Pentagon chief Dick Cheney, continued to wait for the right opportunity to fulfill their imperial dreams. Their long wait came to an end on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001." [more]

"Civil liberties were rapidly becoming the domestic collateral damage of the war on terrorism. It almost could be said they died without a fight, except for a brave but ineffective handful of stragglers in their progressive enclaves." [more]

"4. The Gulf War battlefield remains radioactive and toxic. Scientific research funded by the military and released two years ago links exposure to depleted uranium (DU) ammunition with cancer in rats. Solid depleted uranium bullets, ranging in size from 25mm to 120mm, are used by U.S. tanks, helicopters and planes to attack enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers. The Gulf War battlefield is already littered with more than 300 tons of radioactive dust and shrapnel from the 1991 Gulf War. Another war will only increase the radioactive and toxic contamination among U.S. soldiers. As of today, U.S. troops are not fully trained about the hazards of depleted uranium contamination, even though Congress enacted a law in 1998 requiring extensive training, especially for medical personnel." [more]

"If the Ruckus campers are one vanguard of a growing global resistance to corporate and government exploitation of labor, communities, environment and war, they also need to be on the front lines of protecting and advancing the tools for free and radical communication." [more]