US Iraq war veteran Vince Emanuele speaks out against the US war machine, blowing the whistle on the United States culture of warfare.
Vince Emanuele is a former US Marine of two tours to Iraq who refused to go again by laying down his weapon. He is now organiser for the Michigan chapter of Veterans for Peace and serves on the national board of directors of Iraq Veterans Against War. He host the Veterans Unplugged program on Radio WMS, Michigan.
A concert at the Luminato Festival in Toronto on June 16, 2013 featuring the queen of New York Performance Art, Laurie Anderson, together with musicians Greg Saunier, Eyvind Kang and Doug Wieselman. Internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei joined in via Skype from Beijing for a duel rant about China and the United States.
The concert was also a tribute to the whistleblowers Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. “Your silence will be considered your consents,” Laurie told the audience.
The concert starts at 2:45 and there were a few minor technical problems in the beginning.
More about the event at: Luminato Festival 2013
To our neighbors:
What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.
Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.
Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!
Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend
Source: Spin.com
Also see this Rolling Stone exclusive: Laurie Anderson’s Farewell to Lou Reed
A U.S. drone strike killed three people in northwest Pakistan earlier today, marking the first such attack since Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif publicly called for President Obama to end the strikes. Just last week, Amnesty International said the United States may be committing war crimes by killing innocent Pakistani civilians in drone strikes.
Today we air extended clips from the new documentary, “Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars,” and speak to filmmaker Robert Greenwald. The film looks at the impact of U.S. drone strikes through more than 70 interviews with attack survivors in Pakistan, a former U.S. drone operator, military officials, and more. The film opens with the story of a 16-year-old Tariq Aziz who was killed by drone. just days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. We are also joined by human rights attorney Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, co-author of the report, “Living Under Drones.”
Source: Democracy Now!
Watch Robert Greenwald’s film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars below:
The documentary will only be available to stream online for a limited time. Sign up today to get your link to see the film FOR FREE: Unmanned America’s Drone Wars
‘Inside Job’ provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. The film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.
By Shannon Ebrahim
On Sunday, October 27, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation launched an international campaign from the infamous Robben Island – where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years – for the release of Marwan Barghouti and all Palestinian political prisoners.
The symbolism is powerful. Kathrada launched the “Release Mandela” campaign in 1963, just prior to his own arrest, which saw him also incarcerated on South Africa’s Robben Island for 18 years. Now half a century later, as an 84-year-old veteran, he is launching yet another campaign for an iconic freedom fighter.
Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, travelled to Robben Island with the Palestinian Minister for Detainees, along with hundreds of special guests, including South African struggle veterans and five Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
Barghouti was the first member of the Palestinian Legislative Council to be arrested by Israel, and is one of the most prominent of the more than 5,000 Palestinian prisoners who remain incarcerated in Israeli jails. The European Union and the Inter-Parliamentary Union have called for his release.
Huddled in the back of a fish restaurant in the Gaza Strip in 2001, a few African National Congress (ANC) members of parliament and I sat whispering with Marwan Barghouti. We knew he was number one on Israel’s hit list, but little did we know that within nine months he would be kidnapped by Israeli forces, interrogated and tortured for 100 days, put in solitary confinement for 1,000 days, and, more than 11 years later, become known as “the Palestinian Mandela”.
In an interview Barghouti gave to Al-Monitor in May 2013, he described how the Israelis had kept him in solitary confinement for almost three years in a tiny cell infested with cockroaches and rats. His windowless cell had denied him aeration or direct sunlight, with dirt falling from the ceiling. He was only allowed one hour of exercise a day while handcuffed. He proved unbreakable after three years.
Barghouti’s defiance of the largest military power in the Middle East was inspiring, reminiscent of the fiery determination of the ANC leaders in South Africa twenty years earlier. At the time we met him he was the Secretary General of Fatah, the leader of Fatah’s armed branch Tanzim, and had been the brains behind the first and second intifada. His revolutionary spirit was electric.
He knew very well that sooner or later Mossad would catch up with him, despite his best efforts at being a black pimpernel. In one of a number of attempts to assassinate Barghouti in 2001, the Israeli military ended up killing his bodyguard in a targeted strike. In April 2002, Israeli forces hid in the back of an ambulance and ambushed the house he was staying in, grabbing him. He was later charged for his activities under Tanzim and given five life sentences.
But as with most exceptional freedom fighters elsewhere, his message and persona grew in prison. His popularity has surpassed that of all Palestinian leaders – both in Hamas and Fatah – and he is being hailed by Palestinians as a unifying figure who could lead his people to freedom.
His propensity to unite Fatah and Hamas into one powerful liberation movement insisting on a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders makes him a dangerous threat to Israel’s political establishment. Barghouti’s message is so powerful that Hamas has rallied behind him. When Hamas recently engaged in negotiations on a prisoner exchange with Israel in return for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, they had put Marwan Barghouti at the top of their list. For Israel, Barghouti’s release was not negotiable.
[…]
The most famous Palestinian political prisoner is now calling for a third intifada – a non-violent mass uprising. Non-violent protest will deny Israel the ability to dismiss legitimate Palestinian demands as “terrorism”, a strategy that has discredited the Palestinian cause for many outside observers. It will be a Palestinian version of the Arab Spring that will dominate the headlines and galvanise international public opinion.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is only too well aware of the dangers of such calls. His focus at the United Nations and in private diplomacy on Iran as a nuclear threat has deflected the world’s attention from Palestinian independence, settlement building, and freeing legitimate peace partners.
If Barghouti’s attempt, from prison, to inspire a non-violent protest movement captures the imagination of Palestinians, it could start a significant new chapter in the heretofore tragic history of the Palestinians’ struggle for justice.
Full article at Al Jazeera
More than a decade after US led forces invaded Iraq – there is a legacy of horrific birth defects. Scientists blame the weapons used by the US military. Fallujah is the best known example, the number affected there is 14 times higher than in Hiroshima after an atomic bomb was dropped on it in the Second World War. But RT‘s Lucy Kafanov was the first to take an in-depth look at the lesser-known extent of the human suffering in Najaf.
Cancer is more common than flu in the Iraqi city of Najaf, about 160 km south of Baghdad, one local doctor told RT. After the start of the war rates of leukemia and birth defects “rose dramatically” due to use of depleted uranium by the US military.
“Every single residential street that we’ve visited in several neighborhoods, we found multiple cases of families whose children were ill, families who had lost children who had to bury children, families who had many relatives who were suffering from cancer,” RT correspondent Lucy Kafanov said.
Source: RT News
Yes, that’s right: A North Korean documentary on Western propaganda – and you might be in for a decent surprise. Here is a statement from the translator and narrator:
On a trip to visit family in Seoul in April, I was approached by a man and a woman who claimed to be North Korean defectors. They presented me with a DVD that recently came into their possession and asked me to translate it. They also asked me to post the completed film on the Internet so that it could reach a worldwide audience. I believed what I was told and an agreement was made to protect their identities (and mine).
Despite my concerns about what I was viewing when I returned home, I proceeded to translate and post the film on YouTube because of the film’s extraordinary content. I have now made public my belief that this film was never intended for a domestic audience in the DPRK. Instead, I believe that these people, who presented themselves as ‘defectors’ specifically targeted me because of my reputation as a translator and interpreter.
Furthermore, I now believe these people work for the DPRK. The fact that I have continued to translate and post the film in spite of this belief does not make me complicit in their intention to spread their ideology. I chose to keep posting this film because – regardless of who made it – I believe people should see it because of the issues it raises and I stand by my right to post it for people to share and discuss freely with each other.
Sabine
President José Mujica, the world’s ‘poorest’ president, has surprised the world by making Uruguay the first country to entirely legalise marijuana.
A law already passed in the lower house of Congress and expected to pass in the Senate later this year would make Uruguay the first country in the world to license and enforce rules for the production, distribution and sale of marijuana for adult consumers.
Uruguay is hoping to act as a potential test case for an idea slowly gaining steam across Latin America – that the legalisation and regulation of some drugs could combat the cartel violence devastating much of the region.
Mujica’s recent speech to the UN General Assembly denouncing excess and frivolity, also received global attention:
He may look like a working class grandfather, but 78-year-old Mujica is a man with a powerful message, a leader who is a one of a kind.
Also known as Pepe Mujica, he refused to move to the luxurious house the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders, and chose instead to stay in the modest home he shares with his senator wife in the capital.
His lifestyle and the fact that he donates 90 percent of his salary to charity has earned him the label ‘the poorest president in the world’.
“Those who describe me so are the poor ones,” he says. “My definition of poor are those who need too much. Because those who need too much are never satisfied.”
Mujica is a man who practices the simplicity he preaches and never minces words, a style some of his countrymen criticise as unpresidential, but which makes him a hero to others.
On this episode of Talk to Al Jazeera, President José Mujica discusses his peculiar approach towards marijuana and drug trafficking, his particular way of living and understanding life, and the repercussions the country’s new policies, if approved, might have in the region.
Source: Al Jazeera
American whistle-blower Edward Snowden (Photo by The Guardian)
Whistle-blowers are still regarded as traitors, but the real traitors are those who were responsible for the acts they exposed.
If the German chancellor was truly a brave stateswoman, she would invite Edward Snowden to seek political asylum in her country and honor him. Her colleague, the French president, should have done likewise. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande should have thanked Snowden – the ex-CIA employee who revealed the arrogant wiretapping system that the United States has operated in their countries. But Snowden is hiding in Russia.
Germany and France are livid with the United States because of Snowden’s revelations (he alleged, among other things, that U.S. agencies listened in on telephone conversations of 35 world leaders), but their leaders aren’t brave enough to offer him the respect and refuge he deserves. Snowden has been banished and oppressed.
Similarly, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and Chelsea Manning, who leaked U.S. military documents. Assange has been in hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012, while Manning was convicted to 35 years in prison last August.
All three are heroes of their time that only history will be able to fully appreciate. They will surely be better remembered than Merkel or Hollande. Three anonymous young men who decided not to shut up; three anonymous young men who decided to take action. They broke their countries’ laws because of their developed sense of justice and their bravery, were branded traitors and sentenced to persecution.
Full article at: Haaretz
Muammar Gaddafi’s widow Safia Farkash (Photo by EPA)
“In the memory of NATO’s aggression against my country, which turned Libya into chaos, and in the memory of my husband, whom I consider to be a martyr, my dear son and the people who were with them on October 20, 2011, when NATO air forces shelled the cortege of Libya’s leader, and then, their wounded bodies were butchered by a crowd of people whom I can call no other way than criminals.
What this crowd did to my husband and my son cannot be justified from the point of view of any religion. But I also consider it to be a no lesser crime that the remains of these martyrs are still being hid from their relatives, which is something unprecedented in the entire history.
I demand that all the members of the UN Security Council, the European Union and everyone who has direct or indirect connection with this murder must tell where the remains of these martyrs are and allow their relatives to bury them in a proper way.
I also demand that the African Union, of which Muammar Gaddafi was a founder, should investigate into the murder of him and all the people who were with him on that day.
I demand that the world community should help me to come in touch with my son Saif al-Islam, who has been isolated from all members of our family from the moment of his arrest. Saif’s only “crime” is that he has warned that this revolution can only lead Libya to a chaos – which is something that we are witnessing now.
Saif al-Islam has always been concerned about the situation with human rights in Libya. He has taken many former radical Islamists from American and European prisons and persuaded them to become law-abiding citizens. Many of them have promised him that they would never come back to terrorist activities. But now, some of the people whom Saif has saved from prison are demanding that he should be executed.
Two years after the barbarous murder of my husband, my son and their associates, I am demanding that my voice – the voice of an exiled widow of a country’s leader and a mother – must be heard.”
The slain Muammar Gaddafi (Photo by EPA)
Related: Libya was Africa’s Most Prosperous Democracy | On the Legacy of Muammar Qaddafi | Why Gadhafi Must Die! | Libya: Who Runs This Place? | Libya: Two Years of Chaos
Against the Grain 