Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.

Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, twelve years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”

As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”

Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.

“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”

Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Towards a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a ceasefire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”

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The post Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.

Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, twelve years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”

As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”

Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.

“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”

Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Towards a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a ceasefire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”

+++

The post Pope Francis’s Lesson of Love and Peace appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Members of the Fifteenth Street Meeting of Friends and the New York Catholic Worker gather for a weekly vigil against the bombing of Yemen in New York City on February 3, 2024. Photo credit: Hideko Otake.

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-levelTrump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries sayingthat what has happened “shocks the conscience.”

President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.

In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.

As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”

On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets … This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”

The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”

Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.

A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

The post The Real Outrage in Yemen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Art work by Robert Shetterly, taken from the playbill for “Reap What You Sow”

In mid-November, New York’s Catholic Worker community, located in lower Manhattan, opened their sizable auditorium to host “Reap What You Sow: Don’t Lose Heart!” a two act play with two actors which debuted, for two nights, on the Maryhouse stage.

Prior to the performance, preparations included selecting the sturdiest wooden chairs for audience seating, carefully cleaning furniture and floors, and rearranging the space so the next issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, stacked and ready to mail, wouldn’t interfere with access to the theater. Producers created a set which included curtains made of sheets, an assemblage of donated lights, and a small coffeemaker complete with loud gurgles.

Above were the exposed beams of a building which once functioned as a music school in turn-of-the-century New York City before Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker, appropriated it for works of mercy, feeding hungry people and, as much as possible, housing people in the building’s former musical practice rooms.

It was a fitting spot for the play’s debut. Jack Gilroy, the main author, had created earlier versions. Now the play, authored by Gilroy, zool Zulkowitz, and Olivia Gilroy incorporates the dynamics of “living theater” as actors and activists have fed Gilroy their edits.

The audience were mainly elders who knew one another. Catholic Workers welcomed  Maryknoll Mission sisters, Veterans For Peace, Raging Grannies, and people from Peace Action, World BEYOND War, Code Pink and FOR.

A sprinkling of students from Columbia U. and Fordham, along with a prof from Manhattan College, accompanied by his small son, were also in attendance.

Before the play began, producer zool Zulkowitz played the Beatles’ iconic song, Imagine. Following this came Olivia Rodrigo’s song, Brutal.

Ellie (played by Grazia Saporito) then broke into athletic, riveting dance moves to open the play.

She and her mother, Major Mom, (played by Pat Russell), were winning characters. Tears glistened on Major Mom’s cheeks when she spoke of her experiences as a mother, a widow, and a woman warrior who deeply regretted having killed civilians during missions in which she piloted weaponized drones. The audience learns she was married to Lieutenant Colonel Sean Golden, a marine who died during combat in Iraq. The Major eagerly awaits a promotion to full “Bird Colonel.”

Showing remarkable patience, Major Mom listens to Ellie divulge childhood disappointments, teenage angst, and her current rage over the roles her parents played in “service” to the U.S. military. At one point, Major Mom says “Whoa,” and accuses Ellie of going too far in her accusations.

But Ellie, a debate team champ, doesn’t back down. She has evidence to show that her mom’s “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric and revitalization of World War II themes don’t stand up to actual events in the recent past.

In a way, the play’s two characters are each proxies for fully developed viewpoints. Major Mom represents the Merchants of Death who develop, store, sell and use vast arsenals of weaponry. Ellie champions viewpoints laid out in Howard Zinn’s comprehensive historical outlay, “A People’s History of the United States.”

With Ellie rebelling against revival of World War II rhetoric, the play becomes quite timely. She insists that the good Germans who supported Nazis have counterparts in the U.S. militarists who “take out” women and children in multiple war zones. The claim, “I was only following orders,” eerily enters the script.

Many of the people in the audience have, in the past, supported activists who were recently imprisoned in U.S. federal lockups for having trespassed at a U.S. base harboring nuclear weapons. One of the activists, Carmen Trotta, came to both performances. Plowshares activists literally beat swords into plowshares, damaging nuclear weapons and pouring their own blood over the decommissioned weapons. They believe in making sacrifices, themselves, on behalf of nonviolence, a theme which recurs in Gilroy’s play.

During a dynamic talk back session, actors, producers, and audience members grappled with questions about conscience and pragmatic steps forward. Ellie, still acting in character, urged people to use their imagination and practice empathy. Art, she said, will be the force that carries us through to a new, safe time. Major Mom, (Pat Russell) pointed to the damage caused by structural and systemic violence. Audience members repeatedly voiced outrage over U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians, noting that democrats dared to warn of fascist encroachment while at the same time enabling and provisioning Israel’s mass killing spree, across the Middle East. Israel’s usage of weaponized drones prolongs and exacerbates a war waged by a racist, far-right, nuclear armed, apartheid regime, one to which the U.S. continues to pledge unwavering support.

It seemed all could agree that, as Adam Tooze, writing for the London Review of Books observes:

We should be under no illusion: there has been nothing like this level of threat since the dangerous final phase of the Cold War in the early 1980s. With China committed to a rapid buildup of its nuclear arsenal, we are well on the way to an unprecedented 3-way nuclear standoff.

The characters in Reap What You Sow recognized pivots in their relationships and their interactions, and they assiduously preserved caring relationships. Powerful elites in our world have comprehensively failed to find means for collaboration, opting instead to demonize enemies for their own political gain, pouring energy and resources into the coffers of people whose “top crop” is weaponry. President Biden refuses to negotiate with Putin, and Ukraine has already fired long range missiles, supplied by the U.S., into Russia, sowing ominous seeks which Putin has stated could yield a nuclear exchange.

I hope the play will awaken numerous people, in audiences across this country and beyond, to the crucial question: how can we learn to live together without killing one another? And the follow-up: how can we abolish war?

Reap What You Sow, Don’t Lose Heart is the first production of the Rising Together Talkback Theater Company. The production is available, for FREE, to churches, schools, peace and justice organizations, and other community groups. The company is booking dates for a Summer 2025 “Reap!” Tour. For more information, contact Zool (moc.liamtohnull@scitiloPdnAtrAehT) or text 718-964-7643.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The Biblical Book of Job chronicles a string of catastrophes relentlessly plaguing the main character, Job, who loses his prosperity, his home, his health, and his children. Eventually, an agonized Job curses his own existence as well as the god that created him.

Numerous interpretations of the story exist, and more than one version has circulated through the ancient Near East. One version concludes with Job avowing repentance. “I know that my redeemer liveth, and so I repent in dust and in ashes.”

The Latin root for the word ‘repent’ is pensare – to think. ‘Repent” suggests an effort to rethink.

Job’s surprising repentance has been on my mind as calls increase, in 2024, for the United Nations to rethink its relation to Israel as a member state. Increasingly, civil society groups are pressuring Permanent Missions to the UN to eject Israel as a voting member of the General Assembly.

To paraphrase Pankraj Mishra, writing for the New York Review of Books, a stunned world has watched with disbelief as the United States provisions Israel with weapons enabling a mass murder spree across the Middle East.

Palestinians in the West Bank have recently urged all organizations demanding UN compliance with the International Criminal Court ruling of July 2024 to sign a letter available at World BEYOND War which urges Member States of the United Nations General Assembly to fulfill their duties.

Following up on the potential of this letter, a new coalition, “Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine” has issued a letter to His Excellency Mr. Philemon Yang, the President of the United Nations General Assembly asking him to convene an urgent meeting of the General Assembly to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, establish and secure humanitarian aid corridors and ensure the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The letter additionally requests:

• The revival of the UN Committee Against Apartheid to address systemic violations of international law and human rights in the OPT.
• Consideration of targeted boycotts, sanctions, and divestments, particularly against illegal operations in the OPT.
• The establishment of an arms embargo on Israel.
• Exploration of suspending Israel from the General Assembly until it complies with international law.

To further support these efforts, the letter calls for the establishment of an unarmed UN peacekeeping mission in the OPT under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to ensure the safety and dignity of all civilians.

In a way, Israel has already removed itself from norms maintained by the UN Charter as it has consistently flouted UN treaties, Resolutions and Advisory opinions. We must not forget that Israel refuses to acknowledge to the UN its possession of nuclear weapons.

I felt startled, during an initial planning call held with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, when one of them spoke of the evacuation he and his family faced, that very day, and said, “We are facing the final solution. Israel is imposing the final solution on us.” Other participants spoke of having shuddered during bombings, day and night.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan,  writes movingly in the Guardian of how absurd it is that the United Nations’ General Assembly agrees to seat Israel as a U.N. member nation.

Israel’s abusive repudiation of the very idea of the United Nations, its escalating and lethal violation of countless international norms, its repeated, lethal attacks on U.N. sanctuaries and peacekeepers justifies its expulsion. Hasan reminds us that Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations shredded the UN charter while standing at the General Assembly podium. This is the Charter that declares the UN mission to eradicate the scourge of warfare for future generations.

It is time for the clouds to part above the burning lands of West Asia – for the suffering there to be comforted and their pitiless accusers rebuked by the gathered voice of humanity, by the agent that created Israel and can, when it wishes, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The work here is ours, and so let our United Nations demand, and not beg, humanity from Israel and from its imperial sponsor the United States.

• First published at World BEYOND War.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.

It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus – it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.

“You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.

My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.

Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.

In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends…feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out…it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”

Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance – avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children – while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?

Bartov continues: By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that …Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, … as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, … Israel was acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, the Palestinian population in Gaza, ‘as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction’”.

How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.

When we can, we must act.

We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.

From September 10 – September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions which flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.

We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than a thousand Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, many of them women and children.

Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.

And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.

Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a ceasefire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.

We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.

The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.

It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “uniting for peace” resolution.

As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”, said, “Never again means never again!”

We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/

• A version of this article first appeared on World BEYOND War’s website. https://worldbeyondwar.org/hanging-on-with-gaza/

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.

Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.

Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with which it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

“Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

This article first appeared in The Progressive.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.

If our civilization survives a looming ecological collapse that is helping to drive catastrophic nuclear brinkmanship, I hope future generations of students will study the “Hind’s Hall” occupation in the way that students of the civil rights movement have studied the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the story of Emmett Till. Hind’s story is tragically emblematic. Her cruel murder has befallen many thousands of children throughout the decades of Israel’s fight to maintain apartheid. Just in our young century, from September 2000 to September 2023, Israel’s B’tselem organization reports that 2,309 Palestinian minors were killed by Israelis and some 145 Israeli minors were killed by Palestinians, with these numbers excluding Palestinian children dead from deliberate immiseration via blockade or traumatized as hostages in prisons. We hear reports that thirty-eight Israeli children and some 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered since October 7, deaths which can all be laid on the doorstep of the ethnostate project so lethally determined to keep one ethnicity in undemocratic governance.

No six-year-old poses any threat to anyone. Like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death during the U.S. imposition of economic sanctions against Iraq, none of these children could be held accountable for the actions of their government or military.

Hind Rajab committed no crime, but she was made to watch her family die and wait for death surrounded by their corpses. When the ambulance crew asked safe passage to come rescue her, she was used as bait to kill them as well. Her story must be remembered and told over and over.

As Jeffrey St. Clair writes, Hind was a little girl who liked to dress up as a princess. She lived in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City.

“Hind Rajab was in her own city when the invaders in tanks came,” St. Clair notes. “What was left of it . . . Hind’s own kindergarten, from which she’d recently graduated, had been blown up, as had so many other schools, places of learning, places of shelter and places of safety in Gaza City.”

On January 29, when the Israelis ordered people to evacuate, her mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set off on foot. Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and three cousins who traveled in a black Kia automobile.

The uncle placed a call to a relative in Germany which initiated the family’s contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). After the initial connection with the PRCS switchboard, the car was targeted and hit, killing Hind’s uncle, her aunt, and two of her cousins.

Hind and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, were the only survivors.

Switchboard operators handling the phone contact with Layan had immediately notified ambulance workers that the little girls needed to be rescued.

But it would have been suicidal for a rescue crew to enter the area without first working out coordinates with the Israeli military.

Similar to the World Central Kitchen workers killed on Monday, April 1, they waited hours for the coordinated rescue plan.

On the audio tape shared by the PRCS workers, Layan’s petrified voice can be heard. The tank is coming closer. She is so scared. A blast is heard and Layan no longer speaks. PRCS workers call back and Hind answers.

She pleads, “Please come and get me. I’m so scared.”

St. Clair writes, “The [PRCS] dispatched an ambulance crewed by two paramedics: Ahmed al-Madhoon and Youssef Zeino. As Ahmed and Youssef approached the Tel al-Hawa area, they reported to the Red Crescent dispatchers that the IDF was targeting them, and that snipers had pointed lasers at the ambulance. Then there was the sound of gunfire and an explosion. The line went silent.”

The tank-fired M830A1 missile remnant found nearby had been manufactured in the United States by a subsidiary of the Day and Zimmermann Corporation. Day and Zimmermann prides itself on having once received the U.S. National “Family Business of the Year” award—an Internet search for the award chiefly produces references to this company. The company states that it believes in civic and community service, with core values of safety and integrity; emphasizing their success as a team that hits its targets. But since last October, their business has been killing families like Hind’s.

Although Israel predictably insists that Layan and Hind, and the additional slain paramedics, were all lying with their final breaths and that no IDF tanks were present to attack them, Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite images taken at midday on January 29 corroborates the victims’ accounts and puts at least three Israeli tanks just 270 meters (886 feet) from the family’s car, with their guns pointed at it.

When rescuers were finally allowed to approach the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction.

Hind’s mother couldn’t go to the site until February 12.

On May 5, Israel raided the offices of Al Jazeera at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and moved to shut down the television network’s operations in Israel.

To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.

Universities should, in theory, be places to learn things of importance, and we can learn from the students of Hind Hall to throw comfort and ambition out the window while keeping hold of love, as the students clung to that banner and to the name of Hind Rajab. We can learn to keep hold of our humanity. We learn by doing, as these students are learning to do, drawing wisdom from people like Phil Berrigan who famously said, “Don’t get tired!”

The list of Gaza solidarity encampments grows each day. Conscious of increasing famine in Gaza, students at Princeton University launched a water-only fast on May 4 as they continue to call for their University to divest from corporations selling weapons to Israel. The United Nations warns of a potential collapse of aid delivery to Palestinians with Israel’s May 7 closure of the two main crossings into Gaza. These crossings are critical entry points for food, medicine, and other supplies for Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The disruptions come at a time when officials say northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine.”

With thousands of innocent lives in the balance, promoters of peace should take advantage of this crucial opportunity to follow the young people, learning alongside the students whose hunger for humanity reveals stunning courage.

 Hind Rajab (Image provided, family photo)

Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew (Photo Credit: PCRS)

• This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Now, in the occupied Gaza Strip, as weapons dealers benefit from increasing military shipments to Israel, Palestinians have resorted to eating mixtures of grass and animal feed. The past five months of Israeli siege, bombing, and displacement have killed more than 31,000—mostly women and children—but a process of famine long underway is clearly about to expand that number exponentially, particularly among children.

Human Rights Watch says the Israeli government is starving civilians as a method of warfare in Gaza. Aiding and abetting this war crime, the United States has approved 100 military sales to Israel over the past five months. U.S. bullets, bombs, and guns have helped keep crucially needed aid from reaching millions of Palestinians. The bombs have buried or destroyed much of the food supplies which could have mitigated this horror, and they have forced vast populations to flee attacks and huddle in the city that is Israel’s latest target: Rafah. The United States continues providing the muscle behind a starvation genocide.

On March 11, eight U.S. Senators signed a letter to President Joe Biden insisting that ongoing weapons shipments violate U.S. laws forbidding military aid to regimes that are obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid.

Twenty-five prominent humanitarian and human rights organizations delivered a letter to the President echoing the Senators’ message.

Even as Israel faces mounting pressure from world leaders to stop impeding humanitarian relief shipments, Israel turned back another aid truck, this time because it contained children’s medical kits. These kits included scissors useful for applying bandages or cutting away clothing to reach shrapnel.

The Israelis forbade the scissors as a potential dual-use weapon. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send guns and bombs to Israel.

Each day brings new reports of Palestinians, 40 percent of them children, succumbing to disease and death because they are deprived of food, fuel, clean water, medicines, and shelter. Hellish conditions worsen as infectious contamination spreads from decomposing bodies and the chemical contaminants from thousands upon thousands of Israeli and Western-supplied bombs that have been dropped on Gaza.

Occupiers in Representative Jim McGovern’s office in Massachusetts, March 14, 2024.

In Northampton, Massachusetts, six activists are on the third day of an occupation of the office of Representative Jim McGovern, demanding that he call on the President to immediately halt all weapons shipments to Israel and stop the United States from vetoing United Nations cease-fire resolutions.

“These are desperate times,” says Peter Kakos, one of the occupiers. “We must call for immediate action, and nothing less.” He’s particularly mindful of 17,000 Gazan children who are estimated by UNICEF to be currently unaccompanied or separated from their parents.

We talk about the mental harm on children caused by COVID-19 lockdowns. A March 12, 2024, report by Save the Children draws our attention to what five months of carnage, flight, starvation, and disease, on top of nearly seventeen years of apartheid conditions, will have permanently done to the children of Gaza who survive the brutality now afflicting them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Photograph Source: Wafa (Q2915969) in contract with a local company (APAimages)‏‏ – CC BY-SA 3.0

Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of “War of the Worlds” or some other sci-fi fantasy.

Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone launched laser guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, health care workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.

Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as twelve additional surgeries.  Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives?

He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed health care workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”

According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped forty to forty-five doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three health care professional organizations have issued a statement  expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”

Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate NY who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”

In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to  Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors and then he stopped.  “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”

Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.

From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X:: “Thescary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”

At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.  Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7^th, cannot – even if believed – justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.

The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisors make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality and human dignity.

What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.

If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no-one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.

A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

The post Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone launched laser guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, health care workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.

Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as twelve additional surgeries.  Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives?

He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed health care workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”

According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped forty to forty-five doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three health care professional organizations have issued a statement  expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”

Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate NY who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”

In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to  Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors and then he stopped.  “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”

Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.

From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X:: “The scary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”

At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.  Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7th, cannot – even if believed – justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.

The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisors make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality and human dignity.

What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.

If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no-one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.

 Smoke rising after an Israeli air strike on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on January 3, 2024
Photo Credit:  Shutterstock

 Palestinian Red Crescent first aid waiting to receive bodies from Al-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, on January 10, 2024
Photo Credit: Shutterstock

• A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Palestinians inspect the ruins of Aklouk Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on October 8, 2023. The death toll from the devastating Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has risen to 313 since early yesterday morning, with more than 1,990 others injured, according to medical sources. Photo by Naaman Omar APA images.

World Health Organization now says disease could be even deadlier than airstrikes in Gaza.

Speaking from a hospital ward about 50 meters from where a bomb had just exploded, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder raised his voice over sounds of children screaming. In a video posted on Twitter/X he emphasized that Gaza’s health care system is overwhelmed. Pointing at children packed into the ward of a hospital he said was operating at 200 per cent capacity, Elder insisted the hospital “cannot take more children with the wounds of war…with the burns, with the shrapnel littering their bodies, with the broken bones.”

Calling it a war on children, Elder warned that “inaction by those with influence is allowing the killing.”

We, the citizens of the world, are those with influence as well as our elected officials. It is the citizens of the world who came out by the hundreds of thousands in recent weeks that caused the woefully inadequate gesture of a seven-day truce. Now we must urgently pay heed to another persecution of Gaza’s children and families, waged by one of war’s more silent partners, disease.

Those with influence among authorities in Israel and the United States must reckon not only with the reckless carnage they are inflicting on children. They must also grasp the likelihood of an exponentially increased death toll from battlefield illnesses afflicting children. Surviving Gazans live amid ominous pre-conditions for outbreaks of water-borne diseases especially deadly to children: a mounting number of unburied corpses, unsafe drinking water, overcrowding in impromptu mass shelters where sick people are  denied any access to health care, as well as a breakdown of basic sewage and sanitation systems.

The World Health Organization warns that Gaza is “on the precipice of major disease outbreaks.”

On November 15, 2023, the World Health Organization reported more than 44,000 cases of diarrhea had been documented in Gaza since mid-October — already a dramatic increase compared to previous years and after only two months of the bombardment.

“Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system,” said Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the WHO.

Yet. without electricity and fuel, it’s impossible to repair Gaza’s collapsed healthcare system. Israeli authorities cut off Gaza’s electricity supply after October 11, according to UNOCHA, and fuel reserves for Gaza’s sole power plant have been dangerously depleted.

History repeatedly shows that children in war zones bear the brunt of punishment as bombing wars give way to even more lethal economic war, and what ought to be regarded as biological warfare against children. (It’s noteworthy that Israel is one of only eight world nations not to have signed the Biological Weapons Convention.)

The suffering inflicted on Iraqi children following the 1991 war and ensuing years of merciless economic sanctions is well known to U.S. and Israeli authorities.

When the U.S. Desert Storm bombing war against Iraq ended, on Feb 28, 1991, a new kind of warfare proved far more devastating than even the worst of the bombing. By 1995, UN workers recognized that children were dying, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and eventually by the hundreds of thousands because economic sanctions prevented necessary access to medicines, clean water, and adequate food.

The U.S. military itself predicted epidemic levels of waterborne diseases would break out, in Iraq, because the U.S. bombing had so badly damaged the country’s underground water pipelines, causing cracks allowing sewage to seep into water used by civilians. Thirteen years of punitive economic sanctions cost the lives of countless Iraqis who couldn’t possibly have been held accountable for the actions of their government, – elderly people, sick people, toddlers and infants.

A similar pattern emerges if we turn our gaze toward the Saudi aerial bombing of Yemen from 2015 to 2018. The Saudi attacks against vital sewage and sanitation facilities, and against the electrical plants which powered them, contributed to severe shortages of potable water. The Saudis were also known to bomb sites where Yemenis were digging their own wells.

A report from Save the Children, issued in November 2018, estimated  at least 85,000 children died from extreme hunger since the war began in 2015. The worst cholera outbreak ever recorded infected 2.26 million and cost nearly 4,000 lives. Attacks on hospitals and clinics led to closure of more than half of Yemen’s prewar facilities. Besieged on all sides, 3.65 million Yemenis were internally displaced. An entire generation of Yemeni children will suffer the trauma and disease caused by Saudi bombings using weapons supplied by U.S. and other western manufacturers.

Dr. Yara Asi, a professor of global health management, points out that “the Gaza Strip had fragile health and water, sanitation and hygiene sectors long before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and prompted the retaliatory airstrikes. The health system of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, has long been plagued by  underfunding and the effects of the blockade imposed by Israel in 2007.”

In early 2023, an estimated 97% of water in the enclave was unfit to drink, and more than 12% of child mortality cases were caused by waterborne ailments. Diseases including typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A are very rare in areas with functional and adequate water systems.

Now, OCHA reports over 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80 per cent of the population, are internally displaced. Overcrowding at makeshift UNRWA shelters significantly increased cases of diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, skin infection, and lice. Without wells and water desalination, dehydration and waterborne diseases are mounting threats.

We can’t help but ask whether Israeli officials, intent on continuing the war for possibly as long as a year, see the potential for widespread disease as motivation for families to leave Gaza, accepting massive ethnic cleansing that would displace them beyond Gaza’s borders.

In a recently published investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call, an Israeli intelligence veteran notes Israel’s detailed information on where Gazan civilians are located: “Nothing happens by accident … When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed – that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home. “

Rather than wait for Gazan parents to dig graves for the children sickened by lethal water-borne diseases, we must clamor for a permanent cease fire, reparations, and an end to Israel’s apartheid regime. In the United States, we must truthfully diagnose our diseased foreign policy, sickened for many decades by greed, fear and an addiction to war.

Worldwide, people are demonstrating their commitment to care about the Gazan children who survive this hideous war. The call for a permanent ceasefire includes the utter rejection of weaponizing disease to collectively punish children.

This article first appeared in The Progressive  https://progressive.org/

The post Predicting Pestilence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Calling it a war on children, Elder warned that “inaction by those with influence is allowing the killing.”

We, the citizens of the world, are those with influence as well as our elected officials. It is the citizens of the world who came out by the hundreds of thousands in recent weeks that caused the woefully inadequate gesture of a seven day truce. Now we must urgently pay heed to another persecution of Gaza’s children and families, waged by one of war’s more silent partners, disease.

Those with influence among authorities in Israel and the United States must reckon not only with the reckless carnage they are inflicting on children. They must also grasp the likelihood of an exponentially increased death toll from battlefield illnesses afflicting children. Surviving Gazans live amid ominous pre-conditions for outbreaks of water-borne diseases especially deadly to children: a mounting number of unburied corpses, unsafe drinking water, overcrowding in impromptu mass shelters where sick people are  denied any access to health care, as well as a breakdown of basic sewage and sanitation systems.

The World Health Organization warns that Gaza is “on the precipice of major disease outbreaks.”

On November 15, 2023, the World Health Organization reported more than 44,000 cases of diarrhea had been documented in Gaza since mid-October — already a dramatic increase compared to previous years and after only two months of the bombardment.

“Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than from bombardment if we are not able to put back together this health system,” said Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the WHO.

Yet. without electricity and fuel, it’s impossible to repair Gaza’s collapsed health care system. Israeli authorities cut off Gaza’s electricity supply after October 11, according to UNOCHA, and fuel reserves for Gaza’s sole power plant have been dangerously depleted.

History repeatedly shows that children in war zones bear the brunt of punishment as bombing wars give way to even more lethal economic war, and what ought to be regarded as biological warfare against children. (It’s noteworthy that Israel is one of only eight world nations not to have signed the Biological Weapons Convention.)

The suffering inflicted on Iraqi children following the 1991 war and ensuing years of merciless economic sanctions is well known to U.S. and Israeli authorities

When the U.S. Desert Storm bombing war against Iraq ended, on Feb 28, 1991, a new kind of warfare proved far more devastating than even the worst of the bombing. By 1995, UN workers recognized that children were dying, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and eventually by the hundreds of thousands because economic sanctions prevented necessary access to medicines, clean water, and adequate food.

Demolished vehicles lining Highway 80 in Iraqi during Operation Desert Storm, April 8, 1991.

A similar pattern emerges if we turn our gaze toward the Saudi aerial bombing of Yemen from 2015 to 2018. The Saudi attacks against vital sewage and sanitation facilities, and against the electrical plants which powered them, contributed to severe shortages of potable water. The Saudis were also known to bomb sites where Yemenis were digging their own wells.

A report from Save the Children, issued in November 2018, estimated  at least 85,000 children died from extreme hunger since the war began in 2015. The worst cholera outbreak ever recorded infected 2.26 million and cost nearly 4,000 lives. Attacks on hospitals and clinics led to closure of more than half of Yemen’s prewar facilities. Besieged on all sides, 3.65 million Yemenis were internally displaced. An entire generation of Yemeni children will suffer the trauma and disease caused by Saudi bombings using weapons supplied by U.S. and other western manufacturers.

Dr. Yara Asi, a professor of global health management, points out that “the Gaza Strip had fragile health and water, sanitation and hygiene sectors long before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and prompted the retaliatory airstrikes. The health system of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, has long been plagued by  underfunding and the effects of the blockade imposed by Israel in 2007.”

In early 2023, an estimated 97% of water in the enclave was unfit to drink, and more than 12% of child mortality cases were caused by waterborne ailments. Diseases including typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A are very rare in areas with functional and adequate water systems.

Now, OCHA reports over 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80 per cent of the population, are internally displaced. Overcrowding at makeshift UNRWA shelters significantly increased cases of diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, skin infection, and lice. Without wells and water desalination, dehydration and waterborne diseases are mounting threats.

We can’t help but ask whether Israeli officials, intent on continuing the war for possibly as long as a year, see the potential for widespread disease as motivation for families to leave Gaza, accepting massive ethnic cleansing that would displace them beyond Gaza’s borders.

In a recently published investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call, an Israeli intelligence veteran notes Israel’s detailed information on where Gazan civilians are located: “Nothing happens by accident … When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed – that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home. ”

Rather than wait for Gazan parents to dig graves for the children sickened by lethal water-borne diseases, we must clamor for a permanent cease fire, reparations, and an end to Israel’s apartheid regime. In the United States, we must truthfully diagnose our diseased foreign policy, sickened for many decades by greed, fear and an addiction to war.

Worldwide, people are demonstrating their commitment to care about the Gazan children who survive this hideous war. The call for a permanent ceasefire includes the utter rejection of weaponizing disease to collectively punish children.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Unofficial shrine remembering the victims of the bombing of the Ameriyah shelter in Iran on February 13, 1991. Photo: Lloyd Francis

It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another to use one hand, as a small child, to try and dig your way out of the rubble that has collapsed upon you.

Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, a professor based in Jerusalem, spoke sadly of the reality in Gaza where, he said, “one child dies every ten minutes.”

“It was not the death of a child,” he said, ”but the survival of one, that made me really very, very sad.” He was speaking of a video which had emerged showing a child buried alive under rubble attempting to free herself with one hand.

When we think of how to rescue suffering children from the unbridled carnage of numerous wars that have forced people to go underground, the vast network of tunnels built by the Vietnamese come to mind. To this day, tourists in Viet Nam visit a network of tunnels created by the North Vietnamese, extending from the outskirts of Saigon to the borders of Cambodia. Construction of these tunnels, used both for shelter and by soldiers, began during the French occupation of Viet Nam. Eventually, the complex system gave the North Vietnamese a form of leverage in their effort to fight against the United States military.

Following the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam, weapon makers in the United States focused on developing  ordnance that could destroy underground tunnels and bases. Bombs like the Paveway (GBU-27)were used against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm where they were deployed on February 13, 1991 to attack the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. At that time, families in the Amiriyah neighborhood had huddled overnight in the basement shelter for a relatively safe night’s sleep. The smart bombs penetrated the “Achilles’ heel” of the building, the spot where ventilation shafts had been installed.

The first bomb exploded and expelled 17 bodies out of the building. The second bomb followed immediately after the first, and its explosion sealed the exits. The temperature inside the shelter rose to 500 degrees Celsius and the pipes overhead burst, resulting in boiling water that cascaded down on the innocents who slept. Hundreds of people were burned alive.

Reconstruction of a family room in the Vinh Moc tunnels, Quang Tri, Vietnam. Photo: Margrethe Store CC by 2.0.

In Afghanistan, on April 13^th, 2017, The United States used a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb nicknamed MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, to destroy a network of tunnels in the Hindu Kush mountains. The United States had helped the Mujahideen construct these tunnels during their war against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.

The 21,000-pound MOAB, designed to destroy tunnel complexes and hardened bunkers, still affects the area where it was used.

Locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination. According to one local resident, Qudrat Wali, “All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped.” The 27-year-old farmer showed a journalist red bumps stretched across his calves and said, “I have it all over my body.” He said he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found their land did not produce crops like it had before “We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick and so are we.”

One of the most alarming underground concentrations for massive destruction is located 53 miles from Gaza, where a complex now called the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center has developed at least 80 thermonuclear weapons. First built in 1958, the facility underwent a major renovation just two years ago.

Negev Nuclear Research Center photographed by a U.S. reconnaissance satellite in 1968. Photo: Declassified (Public Domain).

“To this day,” writes Joshua Frank, “Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site.”

A classic 1956 film depicting the horror of a Nazi concentration camp, Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” contains narration that at one point addresses how the terrible sites will be seen in the future.  “Nine million dead haunt this countryside… We pretend that it could only happen once, in this place at that time… The icy water fills the hollows of the mass graves, while war goes to sleep, but with one eye always open.”

Living as we do in a world where countries like the United States maintain a permanent warfare state, we must reckon with the horrific cost of war – and the obscene profits. The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal notes that weapons makers’ stocks on Wall Street have risen 7% since the war started. Recognizing war never sleeps, we must keep our eyes wide open and acknowledge the horrendous toll as well as our responsibility to build a world beyond war.

As much as we might long to grasp the hand of the child trying to free herself from underneath a collapsed building’s rubble, we need to imagine and long for the chance to grasp the hand of someone outside our own community, someone we’ve been taught to regard as an enemy or an invisible “other.”

Writing these words from a safe, secure spot feels hollow, but in my memory I return to the pediatric ward of an Iraqi hospital when Iraq was under a siege imposed by U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions. Agonized and grieving, a young mother, her world crashing in on her, wept over the dying child she cradled. I came from a country that forbade medicine and food desperately needed by each of the dying children in this ward. “Believe me, I pray,” she whispered, “I pray that this will never happen to a mother who is from your country.”

This article first appeared in The Progressive.

The post Tunnels for Safety and Tunnels for Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

It’s one thing to burrow beneath the ground, digging to construct a tunnel for refuge, a passage of goods, or to store weapons during a time of war. It’s quite another to use one hand, as a small child, to try and dig your way out of the rubble that has collapsed upon you.

Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, a professor based in Jerusalem, spoke sadly of the reality in Gaza where, he said, “one child dies every ten minutes.”

“It was not the death of a child,” he said, ”but the survival of one, that made me really very, very sad.” He was speaking of a video which had emerged showing a child buried alive under rubble attempting to free herself with one hand.

When we think of how to rescue suffering children from the unbridled carnage of numerous wars that have forced people to go underground, the vast network of tunnels built by the Vietnamese come to mind. To this day, tourists in Viet Nam visit a network of tunnels created by the North Vietnamese, extending from the outskirts of Saigon to the borders of Cambodia. Construction of these tunnels, used both for shelter and by soldiers, began during the French occupation of Viet Nam. Eventually, the complex system gave the North Vietnamese a form of leverage in their effort to fight against the United States military.

Following the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam, weapon makers in the United States focused on developing  ordnance that could destroy underground tunnels and bases. Bombs like the Paveway (GBU-27) were used against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm where they were deployed on February 13, 1991 to attack the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. At that time, families in the Amiriyah neighborhood had huddled overnight in the basement shelter for a relatively safe night’s sleep. The smart bombs penetrated the “Achilles’ heel” of the building, the spot where ventilation shafts had been installed.

The first bomb exploded and expelled 17 bodies out of the building. The second bomb followed immediately after the first, and its explosion sealed the exits. The temperature inside the shelter  rose to 500 degrees Celsius and the pipes overhead burst, resulting in boiling water that  cascaded down on the innocents who slept. Hundreds of people were burned alive.

In Afghanistan, on April 13, 2017, The United States used a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb nicknamed MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, to destroy a network of tunnels in the Hindu Kush mountains. The United States had helped the Mujahideen construct these tunnels during their war against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.

The 21,000 pound MOAB, designed to destroy tunnel complexes and hardened bunkers, still affects the area where it was used.

Locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination. According to one local resident, Qudrat Wali, “All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped.” The 27-year old farmer showed a journalist red bumps stretched across his calves and said, “I have it all over my body.” He said he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found their land did not produce crops like it had before “We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick and so are we.”

One of the most alarming underground concentrations for massive destruction is located 53 miles from Gaza, where a complex now called the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center has developed at least 80 thermonuclear weapons. First built in 1958, the facility underwent a major renovation just two years ago.

“To this day,” writes Joshua Frank, “Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site.”

A classic 1956 film depicting the horror of a Nazi concentration camp, Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” contains narration that at one point addresses how the terrible sites will be seen in the future.  “Nine million dead haunt this countryside… We pretend that it could only happen once, in this place at that time… The icy water fills the hollows of the mass graves, while war goes to sleep, but with one eye always open.”

Living as we do in a world where countries like the United States maintain a permanent warfare state, we must reckon with the horrific cost of war – and the obscene profits. The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal notes that weapons makers’ stocks on Wall Street have risen 7% since the war started. Recognizing war never sleeps, we must keep our eyes wide open and acknowledge the horrendous toll as well as our responsibility to build a world beyond war.

As much as we might long to grasp the hand of the child trying to free herself from underneath a collapsed building’s rubble, we need to imagine and long for the chance to grasp the hand of someone outside our own community, someone we’ve been taught to regard as an enemy or an invisible “other.”

Writing these words from a safe, secure spot feels hollow, but in my memory I return to the pediatric ward of an Iraqi hospital when Iraq was under a siege imposed by U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions. Agonized and grieving, a young mother, her world crashing in on her, wept over the dying child she cradled. I came from the country that forbade medicine and food desperately needed by each of the dying children in this ward. “Believe me, I pray,” she whispered, “I pray that this will never happen to a mother who is from your country.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post Prioritizing Human Rights in Relations with Saudi Arabia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The Saudis picked us up from the detention center in Daer and put us in a minibus going back to the Yemen border. When they released us, they created a kind of chaos; they screamed at us to “get out of the car and get away.” … this is when they started to fire mortars – to keep us into the mountain line, they fired the mortar from left and right. When we were one kilometer away, … We were resting together after running a lot…and that’s when they fired mortars on our group. Directly at us. There were 20 in our group and only ten survived. Some of the mortars hit the rocks and then the [fragments of the] rock hit us… They fired on us like rain.

— Munira, 20 years old

“Rather than assist people afflicted by droughts, impoverishment and intensifying wars, the United States is acting in its own perceived self-interests and entertaining Saudi demands for even more military power.”

There’s a refugee trail from the Sahel drought region in Africa, into war-ravaged Yemen, and up through Saudi Arabia towards Iraq and Turkey. It’s known as “the Eastern route,” or sometimes “the Yemeni route.”  The Saudi monarchy, already leading an eight-year starvation and bombardment campaign against Iran-aligned, rebel-governed Yemen, has been massacring Ethiopian (and other African) refugees, allegedly in the thousands, to send a message that drought-stricken Africans should choose to die at home and not risk their lives to die in Yemen. It’s a chilling, cruel message.

U.S. imperial policies in the region, which have propped up the brutal Saudi monarchy, ensure continued bloodshed, hunger, division and destabilization. These degenerate policies undermine desperately needed collaboration in the face of ecological collapse. Rather than assist people afflicted by droughts, impoverishment and intensifying wars, the United States is acting in its own perceived self-interests and entertaining Saudi demands for even more military power. The purpose of wooing Saudi Arabia with military contracts is, apparently, to head off a further economic integration of Saudi Arabia with China and Russia, global rivals of the United States.

Sometime during the week of September 3, two U.S. State department representatives will arrive in Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh, to resume negotiations with the Saudi royals. A recent report suggests that the meetings will discuss a NATO-like agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States, a measure which might then move Saudi Arabia closer toward normalizing relations with Israel. What does Riyadh seek in return? “Riyadh has been seeking a NATO-like mutual security treaty that would obligate the US to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense if the latter is attacked,” according to The Times of Israel. The Saudis also seek to strengthen a US-backed civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia and they want assurance about acquiring more advanced weaponry from U.S. military contractors.

At the recent summit of the BRICS+ coalition led by U.S. rival, China, Saudi Arabia was announced as a new member to join in January 2024. Earlier this year China had brokered a resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and its (and the U.S.’) chief regional rival, Iran, which has also been invited to join BRICS+ early next year.  The U.S. State Department’s Brett McGurk and Barbara Leaf, in their Riyadh  trip, will be working to counter integration of the oil-rich Saudi nation into a coalition of nations the U.S. fears as threats to U.S. unipolar hegemony. Routinely, the United States condemns China and Russia for human rights abuses,  – abuses paling beside the worst of Saudi Arabia’s.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has bombed, starved, blockaded and tortured Yemeni civilians. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues to persecute and execute its own civilians for speaking out about cruel wrongdoings.

Human Rights Watch, in their 73-page report, “‘They Fired on Us Like Rain’: Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border,” alleges that Saudi Arabian border guards have fired machine guns and launched mortars at Ethiopians trying to cross into the kingdom from Yemen, likely killing hundreds of the unarmed migrants in recent years. This widespread and systematic pattern of attacks featured incidents, the report states, when “Saudi border guards asked migrants what limb to shoot, and then shot them at close range. Saudi border guards also fired explosive weapons at migrants who were attempting to flee back to Yemen.” The rights group cited eyewitness reports of attacks by troops and images that showed dead bodies and burial sites on migrant routes, saying the death toll could amount to “possibly thousands”.

Also of interest to the two U.S. envoys should be a report from the Guardian which says the U.S. and German militaries have trained and equipped Saudi border guards.

There is a reason for the massive migrant flight from the Sahel into the killing zone that Saudi Arabia, with its international partners, has made of Yemen: The planet is boiling.

Collaboration is surely needed among all peoples in order to cope with and solve the tragic problems, including horrific human rights abuses, certain to escalate because of intensifying climate catastrophes. But military agreements with Saudi Arabia will increase the readiness of Saudi Arabia to attack weaker countries and persecute its own citizenry. Green lighting development of nuclear technology will exacerbate the environmental assaults caused by war. The United States’ policy of confrontation to beat down economic rivals can only worsen these crises.

During years when the United States collaborated with and armed dictators, militaries and paramilitaries in Central and South America, several notable leaders demanded an end to the violence. El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, now canonized as a saint, spoke up:

I would like to appeal in a special way to the men of the army, and in particular to the troops of the National Guard, the police, and the garrisons. Brothers, you belong to our own people. You kill your own brother peasants; and in the face of an order to kill that is given by a man, the law of God that says ‘Do not kill!’ should prevail.

No soldier is obliged to obey an order counter to the law of God. No one has to comply with an immoral law. It is the time now that you recover your conscience and obey its dictates rather than the command of sin. . . . Therefore, in the name of God, and in the name of this long-suffering people, whose laments rise to heaven every day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you! In the name of God: ‘Cease the repression!’

In a sense, he signed his own death warrant when he signed this statement. On March 24, 1980, Romero was assassinated for his courageous words and deeds.

President Joe Biden would do well to heed this Catholic saint, revise the mandate he gives to diplomats working in Saudi Arabia, and rely on Archbishop Romero’s words: Recover your conscience! Stop the repression, stop the killing.

Rather than normalize militarism and human rights abuses, the United States should seek, always and everywhere, to salvage the planet and respect human rights.

The Bombing of a Neighborhood in Yemen, December 28, 2017 (Photo Credit:  Aida Fallace)

• This article first appeared in The Progressive

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Photo Credit: Hellenic Coast Guard

Through a WhatsApp message from Portugal, my friend Eunice Neves asked to share a moment with me. She was with an Afghan couple, Frishta and Mohammad, and their baby son, Arsalan. The young family has resettled in Mértola, a small city in southern Portugal. They looked forward to celebrating World Refugee Day as part of a project which the Portuguese government lauds as a model for refugee resettlement.

I had first met Frishta in 2015 when she was a volunteer teacher, in Kabul, Afghanistan. At a school for “street kids” she helped young child laborers gain literacy and math skills, while also learning basic ideas about nonviolence. The children could be rowdy and boisterous, but when Frishta entered the classroom, they were eager to please their talented teacher. Frishta’s altruism and skill made her a target for persecution when the Taliban ascended to power. Following death threats to her and her husband, the couple fled their home just prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul. Days later, on August 21^st, 2021, Frishta gave birth to Arsalan.

Eventually, after harrowing and harsh months seeking refuge in Pakistan, the family found a safe haven in Portugal. An international group of activists familiar with the former volunteer group helped devise a model resettlement project. Now, 25 young Afghans have been integrated in Portuguese cities. Eight of the young people have spent thirteen months in Mértola, helping rehabilitate arid land through syntropic farming and permaculture. Together, they pursued a program designed to fully integrate them into Portuguese society.

During today’s conversation, Arsalan amused himself with a garden hose by watering the flowers, the walls and himself. “Look where he is now,” said Eunice, shifting the phone to show Arsalan, fully clothed, splashing contentedly in a small tub he had partially filled with water. From his makeshift boat, he blew me a kiss!

Arsalan’s security, in sharp contrast to the dangerous circumstances surrounding his birth, should epitomize the story of every vulnerable refugee seeking a safe haven. Sadly, tragically, and shamefully, on this World Refugee Day, we must recall a tragedy all too familiar which took place last week. In the deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea, a ship carrying at least 100 children, among hundreds of others, capsized.

Irish author Sally Hayden, who, for years, has accompanied migrants attempting to enter Europe, writes: “The dead are victims of the world’s inequality. They are victims of the fact that the privileged of this planet have freedom of movement simply due to the luck of where they were born, while much of the rest must risk their lives in the hope of accessing a secure, dignified life….Those who survive that journey live with huge trauma – many have told me how they are haunted by memories of watching family members or friends drown; how they appealed for help, but their distress calls were ignored; how, when the boat engines failed or fuel ran out and they drifted, they were certain they would die of thirst one by one.”

The mind revolts and simply will not consent to imagine the terror felt by a single child, much less the hundred or so who drowned and sank to the ocean’s deepest depths inside that boat last Wednesday. Photos of the boat before it sank showed the upper decks entirely packed with would-be migrants, meaning that, horrifically, the lower decks were crammed with migrants – including most of the children – as well. It’s estimated 500, or even 750, people were on board. There were only 104 survivors, mostly young adult males with the strength to cling for hours onto available wreckage. There were no life preservers; legal migration had been made near-impossible.

Writing from Ireland, Ed Horgan, a campaigner for Irish neutrality, calls this a tragedy in which “hundreds of migrants were fleeing wars and dire poverty and human rights abuses.” (Irish Examiner, Opinion, 17 June)

Horror spreads everywhere when militarism reigns and weapon sales proliferate, causing displacement and rising numbers of people fleeing violence.

Horgan holds The European Union’s Border and Coast Guard agency, FRONTEX, partly accountable, noting they and the Greek Coast Guard, “had been monitoring this ship for up to 12 hours prior to the disaster, and failed to offer any practical assistance until it was too late.”

Here in the United States, where I live, similar tragedies unfold. One of my closest friends, Laurie Hasbrook, has worked to accompany refugees arriving in Chicago for over two decades. Last weekend, with two other volunteers, she was almost arrested for attempting to serve food and supply warm clothing to shivering and famished migrants who had newly arrived in Chicago. U.S. activists in the southwest face criminal charges for attempting to save the lives of migrants by dropping off water and food supplies along routes where needy people might access the supplies.

We have much to learn from people in Portugal who’ve created model projects based on mutual respect and creative problem-solving as they’ve welcomed young Afghans to become integral members of Portuguese society.

Upholding the right to safety, we should stop pouring money into the coffers of military contractors. These merchants of death take us down the road of militarism and exploitation. Rather than be led by fortress Europe or US-led NATO full spectrum dominance, we should find security by extending the hand of friendship and seeking reciprocal, survivable plans to rehabilitate lands and communities. It’s vital that people worldwide persuade governments to promote global peace and justice instead of wars and military domination which inevitably lead to tragedies like the one which occurred last week in the Mediterranean Sea.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Photo Credit: Hellenic Coast Guard

Through a WhatsApp message from Portugal, my friend Eunice Neves asked to share a moment with me. She was with an Afghan couple, Frishta and Mohammad, and their baby son, Arsalan. The young family has resettled in Mértola, a small city in southern Portugal. They looked forward to celebrating World Refugee Day as part of a project which the Portuguese government lauds as a model for refugee resettlement.

I had first met Frishta in 2015 when she was a volunteer teacher, in Kabul, Afghanistan. At a school for “street kids” she helped young child laborers gain literacy and math skills, while also learning basic ideas about nonviolence. The children could be rowdy and boisterous, but when Frishta entered the classroom, they were eager to please their talented teacher. Frishta’s altruism and skill made her a target for persecution when the Taliban ascended to power. Following death threats to her and her husband, the couple fled their home just prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul. Days later, on August 21^st, 2021, Frishta gave birth to Arsalan.

Eventually, after harrowing and harsh months seeking refuge in Pakistan, the family found a safe haven in Portugal. An international group of activists familiar with the former volunteer group helped devise a model resettlement project. Now, 25 young Afghans have been integrated in Portuguese cities. Eight of the young people have spent thirteen months in Mértola, helping rehabilitate arid land through syntropic farming and permaculture. Together, they pursued a program designed to fully integrate them into Portuguese society.

During today’s conversation, Arsalan amused himself with a garden hose by watering the flowers, the walls and himself. “Look where he is now,” said Eunice, shifting the phone to show Arsalan, fully clothed, splashing contentedly in a small tub he had partially filled with water. From his makeshift boat, he blew me a kiss!

Arsalan’s security, in sharp contrast to the dangerous circumstances surrounding his birth, should epitomize the story of every vulnerable refugee seeking a safe haven. Sadly, tragically, and shamefully, on this World Refugee Day, we must recall a tragedy all too familiar which took place last week. In the deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea, a ship carrying at least 100 children, among hundreds of others, capsized.

Irish author Sally Hayden, who, for years, has accompanied migrants attempting to enter Europe, writes: “The dead are victims of the world’s inequality. They are victims of the fact that the privileged of this planet have freedom of movement simply due to the luck of where they were born, while much of the rest must risk their lives in the hope of accessing a secure, dignified life….Those who survive that journey live with huge trauma – many have told me how they are haunted by memories of watching family members or friends drown; how they appealed for help, but their distress calls were ignored; how, when the boat engines failed or fuel ran out and they drifted, they were certain they would die of thirst one by one.”

The mind revolts and simply will not consent to imagine the terror felt by a single child, much less the hundred or so who drowned and sank to the ocean’s deepest depths inside that boat last Wednesday. Photos of the boat before it sank showed the upper decks entirely packed with would-be migrants, meaning that, horrifically, the lower decks were crammed with migrants – including most of the children – as well. It’s estimated 500, or even 750, people were on board. There were only 104 survivors, mostly young adult males with the strength to cling for hours onto available wreckage. There were no life preservers; legal migration had been made near-impossible.

Writing from Ireland, Ed Horgan, a campaigner for Irish neutrality, calls this a tragedy in which “hundreds of migrants were fleeing wars and dire poverty and human rights abuses.” (Irish Examiner, Opinion, 17 June)

Horror spreads everywhere when militarism reigns and weapon sales proliferate, causing displacement and rising numbers of people fleeing violence.

Horgan holds The European Union’s Border and Coast Guard agency, FRONTEX, partly accountable, noting they and the Greek Coast Guard, “had been monitoring this ship for up to 12 hours prior to the disaster, and failed to offer any practical assistance until it was too late.”

Here in the United States, where I live, similar tragedies unfold. One of my closest friends, Laurie Hasbrook, has worked to accompany refugees arriving in Chicago for over two decades. Last weekend, with two other volunteers, she was almost arrested for attempting to serve food and supply warm clothing to shivering and famished migrants who had newly arrived in Chicago. U.S. activists in the southwest face criminal charges for attempting to save the lives of migrants by dropping off water and food supplies along routes where needy people might access the supplies.

We have much to learn from people in Portugal who’ve created model projects based on mutual respect and creative problem-solving as they’ve welcomed young Afghans to become integral members of Portuguese society.

Upholding the right to safety, we should stop pouring money into the coffers of military contractors. These merchants of death take us down the road of militarism and exploitation. Rather than be led by fortress Europe or US-led NATO full spectrum dominance, we should find security by extending the hand of friendship and seeking reciprocal, survivable plans to rehabilitate lands and communities. It’s vital that people worldwide persuade governments to promote global peace and justice instead of wars and military domination which inevitably lead to tragedies like the one which occurred last week in the Mediterranean Sea.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Through a WhatsApp message from Portugal, my friend Eunice Neves asked to share a moment with me. She was with an Afghan couple, Frishta and Mohammad, and their baby son, Arsalan. The young family has resettled in Mértola, a small city in southern Portugal. They looked forward to celebrating World Refugee Day as part of a project which the Portuguese government lauds as a model for refugee resettlement.

I had first met Frishta in 2015 when she was a volunteer teacher, in Kabul, Afghanistan. At a school for “street kids” she helped young child laborers gain literacy and math skills, while also learning basic ideas about nonviolence. The children could be rowdy and boisterous, but when Frishta entered the classroom, they were eager to please their talented teacher. Frishta’s altruism and skill made her a target for persecution when the Taliban ascended to power. Following death threats to her and her husband, the couple fled their home just prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul. Days later, on August 21^st, 2021, Frishta gave birth to Arsalan.

Eventually, after harrowing and harsh months seeking refuge in Pakistan, the family found a safe haven in Portugal. An international group of activists familiar with the former volunteer group helped devise a model resettlement project. Now, 25 young Afghans have been integrated in Portuguese cities. Eight of the young people have spent thirteen months in Mértola, helping rehabilitate arid land through syntropic farming and permaculture. Together, they pursued a program designed to fully integrate them into Portuguese society.

During today’s conversation, Arsalan amused himself with a garden hose by watering the flowers, the walls and himself. “Look where he is now,” said Eunice, shifting the phone to show Arsalan, fully clothed, splashing contentedly in a small tub he had partially filled with water. From his makeshift boat, he blew me a kiss!

Arsalan’s security, in sharp contrast to the dangerous circumstances surrounding his birth, should epitomize the story of every vulnerable refugee seeking a safe haven. Sadly, tragically, and shamefully, on this World Refugee Day, we must recall a tragedy all too familiar which took place last week. In the deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea, a ship carrying at least 100 children, among hundreds of others, capsized.

Irish author Sally Hayden, who, for years, has accompanied migrants attempting to enter Europe, writes: “The dead are victims of the world’s inequality. They are victims of the fact that the privileged of this planet have freedom of movement simply due to the luck of where they were born, while much of the rest must risk their lives in the hope of accessing a secure, dignified life….Those who survive that journey live with huge trauma – many have told me how they are haunted by memories of watching family members or friends drown; how they appealed for help, but their distress calls were ignored; how, when the boat engines failed or fuel ran out and they drifted, they were certain they would die of thirst one by one.”

The mind revolts and simply will not consent to imagine the terror felt by a single child, much less the hundred or so who drowned and sank to the ocean’s deepest depths inside that boat last Wednesday. Photos of the boat before it sank showed the upper decks entirely packed with would-be migrants, meaning that, horrifically, the lower decks were crammed with migrants – including most of the children – as well. It’s estimated 500, or even 750, people were on board. There were only 104 survivors, mostly young adult males with the strength to cling for hours onto available wreckage. There were no life preservers; legal migration had been made near-impossible.

Writing from Ireland, Ed Horgan, a campaigner for Irish neutrality, calls this a tragedy in which “hundreds of migrants were fleeing wars and dire poverty and human rights abuses.” (Irish Examiner, Opinion, 17 June)

Horror spreads everywhere when militarism reigns and weapon sales proliferate, causing displacement and rising numbers of people fleeing violence.

Horgan holds the European Union’s Border and Coast Guard agency, FRONTEX, partly accountable, noting they and the Greek Coast Guard, “had been monitoring this ship for up to 12 hours prior to the disaster, and failed to offer any practical assistance until it was too late.”

Here in the United States, where I live, similar tragedies unfold. One of my closest friends, Laurie Hasbrook, has worked to accompany refugees arriving in Chicago for over two decades. Last weekend, with two other volunteers, she was almost arrested for attempting to serve food and supply warm clothing to shivering and famished migrants who had newly arrived in Chicago. U.S. activists in the southwest face criminal charges for attempting to save the lives of migrants by dropping off water and food supplies along routes where needy people might access the supplies.

We have much to learn from people in Portugal who’ve created model projects based on mutual respect and creative problem-solving as they’ve welcomed young Afghans to become integral members of Portuguese society.

Upholding the right to safety, we should stop pouring money into the coffers of military contractors. These merchants of death take us down the road of militarism and exploitation. Rather than be led by fortress Europe or US-led NATO full spectrum dominance, we should find security by extending the hand of friendship and seeking reciprocal, survivable plans to rehabilitate lands and communities. It’s vital that people worldwide persuade governments to promote global peace and justice instead of wars and military domination which inevitably lead to tragedies like the one which occurred last week in the Mediterranean Sea.

Photo Credit: Hellenic Coast Guard

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

In the same period, mainstream media sources have continually developed ways to make war appear normal –something necessary, justifiable, or in some cases, “humane.”

Norm Solomon’s War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine erects an edifice of evidence showing deliberate, consistent, coordinated and well-funded efforts to squelch movements opposing the vicious consequences of war.

Solomon asks why people identify more with the bombers rather than the bombed. Then he traces the history of embedded reporters. He shows how the presence of “embeds” (journalists who live among and travel with units of the military) has changed the way wars are covered. The embeds are beholden not only to the military that protect them but also to corporate heads who collude with war profiteers and war planners.

Militarists’ justifications for wars often emphasize the terror wielded by insurgents using bloody tactics. Solomon points out the similarities between suicide bombers causing slaughter on the ground and sophisticated warplanes maiming and killing civilians from the air.

The legendary peace activist Phil Berrigan once likened racism and threats of nuclear war to the many faces of the hydra written of in Greek mythology. Cut off one head and another appears. The many-faced hydra of racism and war now turns to all corners of the globe. Any country refusing to subordinate itself to serving U.S. national interests risks being devastated by U.S. military and economic wars. Increasingly, war planners invoke the nuclear threat.

Authors and orators who challenge the status quo of glorifying and justifying wars face well organized opponents with deep pockets and a vice like grip on mainstream media. Astonishing past efforts, in U.S. history, to outlaw war and denounce the “merchants of death” reached millions of people after the industrial slaughter of World War I.

Eugene Debs, the indefatigable campaigner imprisoned for opposing U.S. foreign policy, ran for president from his jail cell and won nearly a million votes in 1920. The Kellogg Briand pact outlawing war was written into U.S. law in August of 1928. In April of 1935, the New York Times reported that over 60,000 students went on strike, declaring they would never enlist to fight in a foreign war. Former U.S. Representative Jeanette Rankin voted against entering both World War I and World War II.  Norm Solomon shares the moral compass and honorable intent of these heroic resisters. His highly worthwhile book invites readers to embrace his clarity, expose the military machine’s human toll, and campaign to end all wars.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Salman Rushdie once commented that those who are displaced by war are the shining shards that reflect the truth. With so many people fleeing wars and ecological collapse in our world today, and more to come, we need acute truth-telling to deepen our understanding and recognize the terrible faults of those who have caused so much suffering in our world today. In The Mercenary, Jeffrey Stern has accomplished a tremendous feat inasmuch as every paragraph aims to tell the truth.

In The Mercenary, Stern takes on the appalling disaster of war in Afghanistan and in doing so extols the rich and complicated possibilities for a deepening friendship to grow in such an extreme environment. Stern’s self-disclosure challenges readers to acknowledge our limits when we build new friendships, while also examining the terrible costs of war.

Stern develops the two main characters, Aimal, the friend in Kabul who becomes like his brother, and himself, in part by telling and then retelling particular events, so that we learn what happened from his perspective and then, in retrospect, from Aimal’s substantially different point of view.

As he introduces us to Aimal, Stern lingers, crucially, over the relentless hunger afflicting Aimal in his younger years. Aimal’s widowed mother, strapped for income, relied on her innovative young sons to try and protect the family from starvation. Aimal gets plenty of reinforcement for being cunning and becoming a talented hustler.  He becomes a breadwinner for his family before he reaches his teen years. And he also benefits from an unusual education, one that offsets the mind-numbing boredom of living under Taliban restrictions, when he ingeniously manages to gain access to a satellite dish and learn about the privileged white people portrayed in western TV, including the children whose fathers prepare breakfast for them, an image which never leaves him.

I recall a brief film, seen shortly after the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, which depicted a young woman teaching elementary students in a rural Afghan province. The children sat on the ground, and the teacher had no equipment other than chalk and a board. She needed to tell the children that something had happened very far away, on the other side of the world, which destroyed buildings and killed people and because of it, their world would be severely affected. She was speaking of 9/11 to bewildered children. For Aimal, 9/11 meant that he kept seeing the same show on his rigged-up screen. Why did the same show come no matter what channel he played? Why were people so concerned about descending clouds of dust? His city was always plagued by dust and debris.

Jeff Stern tucks into the riveting stories he tells in _The Mercenary_ a popular observation he heard while in Kabul, characterizing expats in Afghanistan as either missioners, malcontents or mercenaries. Stern notes he wasn’t trying to convert anyone to anything, but his writing changed me. In about 30 trips to Afghanistan over the past decade, I experienced the culture as though looking through a keyhole, having visited just one neighborhood in Kabul, and mainly staying indoors as a guest of innovative and altruistic teens who wanted to share resources, resist wars, and practice equality. They studied Martin Luther King and Gandhi, learned basics of permaculture, taught nonviolence and literacy to street kids, organized seamstress work for widows manufacturing heavy blankets which were then distributed to people in refugee camps, – the works. Their international guests grew to know them quite well, sharing close quarters and trying hard to learn each other’s languages. How I wish we had been equipped with Jeff Stern’s hard earned insights and honest disclosures throughout our “keyhole” experiences.

The writing is fast-paced, often funny, and yet surprisingly confessional. Sometimes, I needed to pause and recall my own presumptive conclusions about experiences in prisons and war zones when I had recognized a defining reality for me (and other colleagues who were parts of peace teams or had become prisoners on purpose), which was that we would eventually return to privileged lives, by virtue of completely unearned securities, related to the colors of our passports or skins.

Interestingly, when Stern returns home he doesn’t have that same psychic assurance of a passport to safety. He comes close to emotional and physical collapse when struggling, along with a determined group of people, to help desperate Afghan flee the Taliban. He’s in his home, handling a barrage of zoom calls, logistical problems, fundraising demands, and yet is unable to help everyone who deserves help.

Stern’s sense of home and family alters, throughout the book.

With him always, we sense, will be Aimal. I hope a broad and diverse number of readers will learn from Jeff’s and Aimal’s compelling brotherhood.

The Mercenary, A Story of Brotherhood & Terror in the Afghanistan War  by Jeffrey E. Stern  Publisher:  Public Affairs

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

In The Mercenary, Jeffrey Stern takes on the appalling disaster of war in Afghanistan and in doing so extols the rich and complicated possibilities for a deepening friendship to grow in such an extreme environment. Stern’s self-disclosure challenges readers to acknowledge our limits when we build new friendships, while also examining the terrible costs of war.

Stern develops the two main characters, Aimal, the friend in Kabul who becomes like his brother, and himself, in part by telling and then retelling particular events, so that we learn what happened from his perspective and then, in retrospect, from Aimal’s substantially different point of view.

As he introduces us to Aimal, Stern lingers, crucially, over the relentless hunger afflicting Aimal in his younger years. Aimal’s widowed mother, strapped for income, relied on her innovative young sons to try and protect the family from starvation. Aimal gets plenty of reinforcement for being cunning and becoming a talented hustler.  He becomes a breadwinner for his family before he reaches his teen years. And he also benefits from an unusual education, one that offsets the mind-numbing boredom of living under Taliban restrictions, when he ingeniously manages to gain access to a satellite dish and learn about the privileged white people portrayed in western TV, including the children whose fathers prepare breakfast for them, an image which never leaves him.

I recall a brief film, seen shortly after the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, which depicted a young woman teaching elementary students in a rural Afghan province. The children sat on the ground, and the teacher had no equipment other than chalk and a board. She needed to tell the children that something had happened very far away, on the other side of the world, which destroyed buildings and killed people and because of it, their world would be severely affected. She was speaking of 9/11 to bewildered children. For Aimal, 9/11 meant that he kept seeing the same show on his rigged-up screen. Why did the same show come no matter what channel he played? Why were people so concerned about descending clouds of dust? His city was always plagued by dust and debris.

Jeff Stern tucks into the riveting stories he tells in The Mercenary, a popular observation he heard while in Kabul, characterizing expats in Afghanistan as either missioners, malcontents or mercenaries. Stern notes he wasn’t trying to convert anyone to anything, but his writing changed me. In about 30 trips to Afghanistan over the past decade, I experienced the culture as though looking through a keyhole, having visited just one neighborhood in Kabul, and mainly staying indoors as a guest of innovative and altruistic teens who wanted to share resources, resist wars, and practice equality. They studied Martin Luther King and Gandhi, learned basics of permaculture, taught nonviolence and literacy to street kids, organized seamstress work for widows manufacturing heavy blankets which were then distributed to people in refugee camps — the works. Their international guests grew to know them quite well, sharing close quarters and trying hard to learn each other’s languages. How I wish we had been equipped with Jeff Stern’s hard earned insights and honest disclosures throughout our “keyhole” experiences.

The writing is fast-paced, often funny, and yet surprisingly confessional. Sometimes, I needed to pause and recall my own presumptive conclusions about experiences in prisons and war zones when I had recognized a defining reality for me (and other colleagues who were parts of peace teams or had become prisoners on purpose), which was that we would eventually return to privileged lives, by virtue of completely unearned securities, related to the colors of our passports or skins.

Interestingly, when Stern returns home he doesn’t have that same psychic assurance of a passport to safety. He comes close to emotional and physical collapse when struggling, along with a determined group of people, to help desperate Afghan flee the Taliban. He’s in his home, handling a barrage of zoom calls, logistical problems, fundraising demands, and yet is unable to help everyone who deserves help.

Stern’s sense of home and family alters, throughout the book.

With him always, we sense, will be Aimal. I hope a broad and diverse number of readers will learn from Jeff’s and Aimal’s compelling brotherhood.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post To End All Wars, Close All Bases appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

We need glimmers of imagination about the worldwide potential for accomplishing good results by choosing the “works of mercy” over “the works of war.” Why not brainstorm about how resources devoted to military goals of domination and destruction could be put to use defending people against the greatest threats we all face—the looming terror of ecological collapse, the ongoing potential for new pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and threats to use them?

But a crucial first step entails fact-based education about the global infrastructure of the American military empire. What is the cost of maintaining each base, how much environmental damage does each base cause (consider depleted uranium poison, water contamination, noise pollution, and risks of nuclear weapon storage). We also need analysis about ways the bases exacerbate the likelihood of war and prolong the vicious spirals of violence attendant on all wars. How does the U.S. military justify the base, and what is the human rights record of the government the U.S. negotiated with to build the base?

The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one database that is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying toll of U.S. militarism, and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tom Dispatch, notes the paucity of discussion about the expanse of U.S. military bases, some of which he calls MIA because the U.S. military manipulates information and neglects to even name various forwarding operating bases. With very little oversight or discussion on the subject domestically, Engelhardt warns that the “massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains firmly in place.”

Thanks to the tenacious work of researchers who formed the No Bases campaign, World Beyond War (WBW) now presents the many-faced hydra of U.S. militarism, worldwide, in a visual database.

Researchers, scholars, journalists, students, and activists can consult this tool for help in exploring vital questions about the cost and impact of the bases.

It’s a unique and challenging resource.

At the helm of daily exploration enabling the mapping project’s growth is Mohammad Abunahel.

On almost any given day in Abunahel’s busy life, he sets aside time, far more than he is compensated for, to work on the mapping project. He and his wife are both Ph.D. students in Mysore, India. They share caring for their infant son, Munir. He takes care of the baby while she studies, and then they trade roles. For years, Abunahel has devoted skill and energy to create a map which now draws the most “hits” of any section on the WBW website. He considers the map as a step in addressing wider problems of militarism. The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one database that is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying toll of U.S. militarism, and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Abunahel has good reason to resist military dominance and the threats of destroying cities and towns with overwhelming weaponry. He grew up in Gaza. Throughout his young life, before he finally managed to obtain visas and scholarships to study in India, he experienced constant violence and deprivation. As one of ten children in an impoverished family, he readily applied himself in classroom studies, hoping to improve his chances for a normal life, but, along with the constant threats of Israeli military violence, Abunahel faced closed doors, dwindling options, and rising anger, his own and that of most other people he knew. He wanted out. Having lived through successive Israeli Occupation Force onslaughts that killed and maimed hundreds of innocent people of Gaza, including children, and destroyed homes, schools, roadways, electrical infrastructure, fisheries, and farms, Abunahel grew certain that no country has a right to destroy another.

He's also adamant about our collective responsibility to question justifications for the U.S. network of military bases. Abunahel rejects the notion that the bases are necessary to protect U.S. people. He sees clear patterns showing the base network being used to impose U.S. national interests on people in other countries. The threat is clear: If you do not submit yourselves to fulfill U.S. national interests, the United States could eliminate you. And if you don’t believe this, look at other countries that were surrounded by U.S. bases. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan.

David Swanson, the executive director of World Beyond War, reviewing David Vine’s book, The United States of War, notes that “since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence has correlated with the U.S. military starting conflicts. Vine modifies a line from Field of Dreams to refer not to a baseball field but to bases: ‘If you build them, wars will come.’ Vine also chronicles countless examples of wars begetting bases begetting wars begetting bases that not only beget yet more wars but also serve to justify the expense of more weapons and troops to fill the bases, while simultaneously producing blowback—all of which factors build momentum toward more wars.”

Illustrating the extent of the USA’s network of military outposts deserves support. Calling attention to the WBW website and using it to help resist all wars are vital ways to expand the potential for expanding and organizing resistance to U.S. militarism. WBW will also welcome financial contributions to assist Mohammad Abunahel and his wife who are, by the way, excitedly awaiting the birth of their second child. WBW would like to increase the small income he earns. It will be a way to support his growing family as he raises our awareness of warmaking and our resolve to build a world beyond war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

A Gazan Ph.D. candidate studying in India, Mohammad Abunahel steadily refines and updates a map on the World BEYOND War website, dedicating a portion of every day to continue researching the extent and impact of USA foreign bases.  What is Mohammad Abunahel learning, and how can we support him?

On the few occasions when a government moves toward converting property or weapon production facilities into something useful for human beings, I can’t restrain a tumbling brainstorm:  what if this signals a trend, what if practical problem-solving begins to trump reckless war preparation? And so, when Spain’s President Sanchez announced on April 26 that his government will build 20,000 homes for social housing on land owned by the country’s Ministry of Defense, I immediately thought about crowded refugee camps around the world and inhumane treatment of people without homes. Visualize the vast capacity to welcome people into decent housing and promising futures if space, energy, ingenuity and funds were diverted from the Pentagon to meet human needs.

We need glimmers of imagination about the worldwide potential for accomplishing good results by choosing the “works of mercy” over “the works of war.”  Why not brainstorm about how resources devoted to military goals of domination and destruction could be put to use defending people against the greatest threats we all face, – the looming terror of ecological collapse, the ongoing potential for new pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and threats to use them?

But a crucial first step entails fact-based education about the global infrastructure of the USA’s military empire. What is the cost of maintaining each base, how much environmental damage does each base cause (consider depleted uranium poison, water contamination, noise pollution, and risks of nuclear weapon storage). We also need analysis about ways the bases exacerbate the likelihood of war and prolong the vicious spirals of violence attendant on all wars. How does the U.S. military justify the base, and what is the human rights record of the government the U.S. negotiated with to build the base?

Tom Englehardt of Tom Dispatch notes the paucity of discussion about the expanse of U.S. military bases, some of which he calls MIA because the U.S. military manipulates information and neglects to even name various forwarding operating bases. “With very little oversight or discussion,” says Englehardt, “the massive (and massively expensive) base structure remains in place.”

Thanks to the tenacious work of researchers who formed the No Bases campaign, World BEYOND War now presents the many-faced hydra of U.S. militarism, worldwide, in a visual database.

Researchers, scholars, journalists, students and activists can consult this tool for help in exploring vital questions about the cost and impact of the bases.

It’s a unique and challenging resource.

At the helm of daily exploration enabling the mapping project’s growth is Mohammad Abunahel.

On almost any given day in Abunahel’s busy life, he sets aside time, far more than he is compensated for, to work on the mapping project. He and his wife are both Ph.D. students in Mysore, India. They share caring for their infant son, Munir. He takes care of the baby while she studies and then they trade roles. For years, Abunahel has devoted skill and energy to create a map which now draws the most “hits” of any section on the WBW website. He considers the maps as a step in addressing wider problems of militarism. The unique concept shows all U.S. bases along with their negative impacts in one data base which is easy to navigate. This allows people to grasp the intensifying  toll of U.S. militarism and also provides information useful for taking action to close bases.

Abunahel has good reason to resist military dominance and the threats of destroying cities and towns with overwhelming weaponry. He grew up in Gaza. Throughout his young life, before he finally managed to obtain visas and scholarships to study in India, he experienced constant violence and deprivation. As one of ten children in an impoverished family, he readily applied himself in classroom studies, hoping to improve his chances for a normal life, but along with the constant threats of Israeli military violence, Abunahel faced closed doors, dwindling options, and rising anger, his own and that of most other people he knew. He wanted out.  Having lived through successive Israeli Occupation  Force onslaughts, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent people of Gaza, including children, and destroying homes, schools, roadways, electrical infrastructure, fisheries and farms, Abunahel grew certain that no country has a right to destroy another.

He’s also adamant about our collective responsibility to question justifications for the U.S. network of military bases. Abunahel rejects the notion that the bases are necessary to protect U.S. people. He sees clear patterns showing the base network being used to impose U.S. national interests on people in other countries. The threat is clear: if you do not submit yourselves to fulfill U.S. national interests, the United States could eliminate you. And if you don’t believe this, look at other countries that were surrounded by U.S. bases. Consider Iraq, or Afghanistan.

David Swanson, the Executive Director of World BEYOND War, reviewing David Vine’s book, The United States of War, notes that “since the 1950s, a U.S. military presence has correlated with the U.S. military starting conflicts. Vine modifies a line from Field of Dreams to refer not to a baseball field but to bases: ‘If you build them, wars will come.’ Vine also chronicles countless examples of wars begetting bases begetting wars begetting bases that not only beget yet more wars but also serve to justify the expense of more weapons and troops to fill the bases, while simultaneously producing blowback — all of which factors build momentum toward more wars.”

Illustrating the extent of the USA’s network of military outposts deserves support. Calling attention to the WBW website and using it to help resist all wars are vital ways to expand the potential for expanding and organizing resistance to U.S. militarism. WBW will also welcome financial contributions to assist Mohammad Abunahel and his wife who are, by the way, excitedly awaiting the birth of their second child. WBW would like to increase the small income he earns. It will be a way to support his growing family as he raises our awareness of warmaking and our resolve to build a world BEYOND war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Image Source: Alejandro Lecuna – CC BY-SA 4.0

The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”

This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20^th, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.

“So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved … seize the moment,” Milley told the Economic Club of New York.

Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response, we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace groups longing to prevent a looming war.

In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.

Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns.

Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?

I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring, “Will we always be this way?”

Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind after “ending” a war of choice.

Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.

“I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”

“War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions, prolonging the agony.

He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense inert metal explosiveslop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons trying to remove the sinister material.

“You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”

As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia, some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a nuclear war?

U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022, four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”

UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”

Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded.

Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war began.

In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.

Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, spoke confidentlyabout getting F-16 fighter jets next. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he told Reuters.

Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January 24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”

Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the Doomsday Clock sounds an alarm for all humanity. “We are on the brink of a precipice,” she said. “But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and livable planet. From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done. The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset.”

As do we all. The Doomsday Clock indicates we’re living on borrowed time. We needn’t “always be this way.

Over the past decade, I was fortunate to be hosted in dozens of trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, by young Afghans who fervently believed that words could be stronger than weapons. They espoused a simple, pragmatic proverb: “Blood does not wash away blood.”

We owe to future generations every possible effort to renounce all war and protect the planet.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.

“So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved … seize the moment,” Milley told the Economic Club of New York.

Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response, we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace groups longing to prevent a looming war.

In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.

Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns.

Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?”

I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring, “Will we always be this way?”

Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind after “ending” a war of choice.

Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.

“I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”

“War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions, prolonging the agony.

He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense inert metal explosives lop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons trying to remove the sinister material.

“You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”

As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia, some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a nuclear war?

U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022, four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”

UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”

Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded.

Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war began.
In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.

Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, spoke confidently about getting F-16 fighter jets next. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he told Reuters.

Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January 24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”

Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the Doomsday Clock sounds an alarm for all humanity. “We are on the brink of a precipice,” she said. “But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and livable planet. From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done. The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset.”

As do we all. The Doomsday Clock indicates we’re living on borrowed time. We needn’t “always be this way.”

Over the past decade, I was fortunate to be hosted in dozens of trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, by young Afghans who fervently believed that words could be stronger than weapons. They espoused a simple, pragmatic proverb: “Blood does not wash away blood.”

We owe to future generations every possible effort to renounce all war and protect the planet.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Phillip Berrigan holding a sign prior to being arrested for not having a permit during a protest on the sidewalk in front of the White House in Washington D.C.. on October 16, 1984. (Photo by Mark Reinstein via ShutterStock).

Peace activists take on the Pentagon and its corporate outposts.

Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.

The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.

Dr. Liu’s sad observations seemed to echo in the words of Pope Francis lamenting war’s afflictions. “We live with this diabolic pattern of killing one another out of the desire for power, the desire for security, the desire for many things. But I think of the hidden wars, those no one sees, that are far away from us,” he said. “People speak about peace. The United Nations has done everything possible, but they have not succeeded.” The tireless struggles of numerous world leaders, like Pope Francis and Dr. Joanne Liu, to stop the patterns of war were embraced vigorously by Phil Berrigan, a prophet of our time.

“Oppose any and all wars,” he urged. “There has never been a just war.”  “Don’t get tired!” he begged people, adding, “I love the Buddhist proverb, ‘I will not kill, but I will prevent others from killing.’ ”

People who’ve embraced his message continue meeting at the Pentagon, as happened December 28 when activists commemorated the “Feast of the Holy Innocents.” Christians traditionally dedicate this day to the remembrance of a time when King Herod ordered the massacre of children under two years of age because of a paranoid belief that one of the recently born children in the region would grow up to oust Herod from power and kill him. Activists gathered at the Pentagon held signs decrying the slaughter of innocents in our time. They’ll protest the obscenely bloated military budget which the U.S. Congress just passed as a part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.

As Norman Stockwell of The Progressive recently noted, “The bill contains nearly $1.7 trillion of funding for FY2023, but of that money, $858 billion is earmarked for the military (‘defense spending’) and an additional $45 billion in ‘emergency assistance to Ukraine and our NATO allies.’ This means that more than half ($900 billion out of $1.7 trillion) is not being used for ‘non-defense discretionary programs’—and even that lesser portion includes $118.7 billion for funding of the Veterans Administration, another military-related expense.”

By depleting funds desperately needed to meet human needs, the U.S. “defense” budget doesn’t defend people from pandemics, ecological collapse, and infrastructure decay. Instead it continues a deranged   investment in militarism.  Phil Berrigan’s prophetic intransigency, resisting all wars and weapons manufacturing, is needed now more than ever.

Outraged by the reckless slaughter of innocent people in wars ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Phil Berrigan insisted that weapons manufacturers profiting from endless wars should be held accountable for criminal activity. The weapons corporations rob people, worldwide, of the capacity to meet basic human needs..

The appallingly greedy Pentagon budget represents a corporate takeover of the U.S. Congress. As the coffers of weapons manufacturers swell, these military contractors hire legions of highly paid lobbyists tasked with persuading elected officials to earmark even more funds for companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. According to militarists, stockpiles of weapons must be used up, in order to justify more weapons manufacturing. Media complicity is necessary, and can be purchased, in order to frighten U.S. taxpayers into the continued bankrolling of what could become worldwide annihilation.

Mark Reinstein

Phil Berrigan, who in his lifetime evolved from soldier to scholar to prophetic anti-nuclear activist, astutely linked the racial oppression he opposed as a civil rights activist to the rising oppression caused by militarism. He likened racial injustice to a terrible hydra that contrives a new face for every area of the world. Throughout his life, Phil Berrigan identified with people menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war. Elaborating on this theme in a book called No More Strangers, published in 1965, he wrote that the dispassionate decision of people in the United States to practice racial discrimination made it “not only easy but logical to enlarge our oppressions in the form of international nuclear threats.”

How can we in the United States prevent the killing that goes on, in our name, in multiple wars, exacerbated by weapons made in the U.S.A? How can we resist the growing potential, acute scourge of a nuclear exchange as warring parties continue issuing nuclear threats in Ukraine and Russia?

One step we can take involves both political and humanitarian efforts to hold accountable the corporations profiting from the U.S. military budget. Drawing on Phil Berrigan’s steadfastness, activists worldwide are planning the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal scheduled to be held November 10 to 13, 2023. The Tribunal intends to collect evidence about crimes against humanity committed by those who develop, store, sell, and use weapons to commit crimes against humanity. Testimony is being sought from people who’ve borne the brunt of modern wars, the survivors of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia, to name but a few of the places where U.S. weapons have terrified people who’ve meant us no harm.

“We render you, corporations obsessed with war profiteering, accountable; answerable!,” declares the Reverend Dr. Cornel West on the Tribunal’s website.

On November 10, 2022, organizers of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal and their supporters served a “subpoena” to the directors and corporate offices of weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. The subpoena, which will expire on February 10, 2023, compels them to provide to the Tribunal all documents revealing their complicity in aiding and abetting the United States government in committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, bribery, and theft.

People menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war often have nowhere to flee, nowhere to hide. Thousands upon thousands of the victims are children.

Mindful of the children who are maimed, traumatized, displaced, orphaned, and killed by all of the wars raging today, we must hold ourselves accountable as well. Phil Berrigan’s challenge must become ours:  “Meet me at the Pentagon!” Or at its corporate outposts.

Humanity literally cannot live in complicity with the patterns that lead to bombing hospitals and slaughtering children.

This article is posted at The Progressive.org; a shorter version appears on the World BEYOND War website.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.

The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.

Dr. Liu’s sad observations seemed to echo in the words of Pope Francis lamenting war’s afflictions. “We live with this diabolic pattern of killing one another out of the desire for power, the desire for security, the desire for many things. But I think of the hidden wars, those no one sees, that are far away from us," he said. “People speak about peace. The United Nations has done everything possible, but they have not succeeded.” The tireless struggles of numerous world leaders, like Pope Francis and Dr. Joanne Liu, to stop the patterns of war were embraced vigorously by Phil Berrigan, a prophet of our time.

“Oppose any and all wars,” he urged. “There has never been a just war.” “Don’t get tired!” he begged people, adding, “I love the Buddhist proverb, ‘I will not kill, but I will prevent others from killing.’ ”

People who’ve embraced his message continue meeting at the Pentagon, as happened December 28 when activists commemorated the “Feast of the Holy Innocents.” Christians traditionally dedicate this day to the remembrance of a time when King Herod ordered the massacre of children under two years of age because of a paranoid belief that one of the recently born children in the region would grow up to oust Herod from power and kill him. Activists gathered at the Pentagon held signs decrying the slaughter of innocents in our time. They’ll protest the obscenely bloated military budget which the U.S. Congress just passed as a part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.

As Norman Stockwell of The Progressive recently noted, “The bill contains nearly $1.7 trillion of funding for FY2023, but of that money, $858 billion is earmarked for the military (‘defense spending’) and an additional $45 billion in ‘emergency assistance to Ukraine and our NATO allies.’ This means that more than half ($900 billion out of $1.7 trillion) is not being used for ‘non-defense discretionary programs’—and even that lesser portion includes $118.7 billion for funding of the Veterans Administration, another military-related expense.”

By depleting funds desperately needed to meet human needs, the U.S. “defense” budget doesn’t defend people from pandemics, ecological collapse, and infrastructure decay. Instead it continues a deranged investment in militarism. Phil Berrigan’s prophetic intransigency, resisting all wars and weapons manufacturing, is needed now more than ever.

Outraged by the reckless slaughter of innocent people in wars ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Phil Berrigan insisted that weapons manufacturers profiting from endless wars should be held accountable for criminal activity. The weapons corporations rob people, worldwide, of the capacity to meet basic human needs.

The appallingly greedy Pentagon budget represents a corporate takeover of the U.S. Congress. As the coffers of weapons manufacturers swell, these military contractors hire legions of highly paid lobbyists tasked with persuading elected officials to earmark even more funds for companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. According to militarists, stockpiles of weapons must be used up, in order to justify more weapons manufacturing. Media complicity is necessary, and can be purchased, in order to frighten U.S. taxpayers into the continued bankrolling of what could become worldwide annihilation.

Phil Berrigan, who in his lifetime evolved from soldier to scholar to prophetic anti-nuclear activist, astutely linked the racial oppression he opposed as a civil rights activist to the rising oppression caused by militarism. He likened racial injustice to a terrible hydra that contrives a new face for every area of the world. Throughout his life, Phil Berrigan identified with people menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war. Elaborating on this theme in a book called No More Strangers, published in 1965, he wrote that the dispassionate decision of people in the United States to practice racial discrimination made it “not only easy but logical to enlarge our oppressions in the form of international nuclear threats.”

How can we in the United States prevent the killing that goes on, in our name, in multiple wars, exacerbated by weapons made in the U.S.A? How can we resist the growing potential, acute scourge of a nuclear exchange as warring parties continue issuing nuclear threats in Ukraine and Russia?

One step we can take involves both political and humanitarian efforts to hold accountable the corporations profiting from the U.S. military budget. Drawing on Phil Berrigan’s steadfastness, activists worldwide are planning the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal scheduled to be held November 10 to 13, 2023. The Tribunal intends to collect evidence about crimes against humanity committed by those who develop, store, sell, and use weapons to commit crimes against humanity. Testimony is being sought from people who’ve borne the brunt of modern wars, the survivors of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia, to name but a few of the places where U.S. weapons have terrified people who’ve meant us no harm.

“We render you, corporations obsessed with war profiteering, accountable; answerable!,” declares the Reverend Dr. Cornel West on the Tribunal’s website.

On November 10, 2022, organizers of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal and their supporters served a “subpoena” to the directors and corporate offices of weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. The subpoena, which will expire on February 10, 2023, compels them to provide to the Tribunal all documents revealing their complicity in aiding and abetting the United States government in committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, bribery, and theft.

People menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war often have nowhere to flee, nowhere to hide. Thousands upon thousands of the victims are children.

Mindful of the children who are maimed, traumatized, displaced, orphaned, and killed by all of the wars raging today, we must hold ourselves accountable as well. Phil Berrigan’s challenge must become ours: “Meet me at the Pentagon!” Or at its corporate outposts.

Humanity literally cannot live in complicity with the patterns that lead to bombing hospitals and slaughtering children.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

As President Joe Biden embarks on his trip to the Middle East, those of us back home must acknowledge that a “sensitive” trip would visit the victims rather than the butchers.

President Joe Biden’s foreign policy advisors are applauding themselves for devising a “sensitive” itinerary as he plans to embark on a trip to the Middle East on July 13.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Biden defended his controversial planned meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (known as MBS), saying it is meant not only to bolster U.S. interests but also to bring peace to the region.

It seems that his trip will not include Yemen, though if this were truly a “sensitive” visit, he would be stopping at one of Yemen’s many beleaguered refugee camps. There he could listen to people displaced by war, some of whom are shell-shocked from years of bombardment. He could hear the stories of bereaved parents and orphaned children, and then express true remorse for the complicity of the United States in the brutal aerial attacks and starvation blockade imposed on Yemen for the past eight years.

From the vantage point of a Yemeni refugee camp, Biden could insist that no country, including his own, has a right to invade another land and attempt to bomb its people into submission. He could uphold the value of the newly extended truce between the region’s warring parties, allowing Yemenis a breather from the tortuous years of war, and then urge ceasefires and settlements to resolve all militarized disputes, including Russia’s war in Ukraine. He could beg for a new way forward, seeking political will, universally, for disarmament and a peaceful, multipolar world.

More than 150,000 people have been killed in the war in Yemen, 14,500 of whom were civilians. But the death toll from militarily imposed poverty has been immeasurably higher. The war has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, creating an unprecedented level of hunger in Yemen, where millions of people face severe hardship.

Some 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure; by December 2022, the projected number of hungry people will likely rise to 19 million. The rate of child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world, and nutrition continues to deteriorate.

I grew to understand the slogan “No Blood for Oil” while living in Iraq during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm war, the 1998 Desert Fox war, and the 2003 Shock and Awe war. To control the pricing and the flow of oil, the United States and its allies slaughtered and maimed thousands of Iraqi people. Visits to Iraqi pediatric wards from 1996 to 2003 taught me a tragic expansion of that slogan. We must certainly insist: “No Starvation for Oil.”

During twenty-seven trips to Iraq, all in defiance of the U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq, I was part of delegations delivering medicines directly to Iraqi hospitals in cities throughout the country. We witnessed the ghastly crime of punishing children to death for the sake of an utterly misguided U.S. foreign policy. The agony endured by Iraqi families who watched their children starve has now become the nightmare experience of Yemeni families.

It’s unlikely that a U.S. President or any leader of a U.S-allied country will ever visit a Yemeni refugee camp, but we who live in these countries can take refuge in the hard work of becoming independent of fossil fuels, shedding the pretenses that we have a right to consume other people’s precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate prices and that war against children is an acceptable price to pay so that we can maintain this right.

We must urgently simplify our over-consumptive lifestyles, share resources radically, prefer service to dominance, and insist on zero tolerance for starvation.

This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post No Starvation for Oil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post No Starvation for Oil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post The People of Yemen Suffer Atrocities, too appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The United Nations’ goal was to raise more than $4.2 billion for the people of war-torn Yemen by March 15. But when that deadline rolled around, just $1.3 billion had come in.

​​“I am deeply disappointed,” said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The people of Yemen need the same level of support and solidarity that we’ve seen for the people of Ukraine. The crisis in Europe will dramatically impact Yemenis’ access to food and fuel, making an already dire situation even worse.”

The Saudi blockade of Yemen has choked off essential imports needed for daily life, forcing the Yemeni people to depend on relief groups for survival.

With Yemen importing more than 35% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, disruption to wheat supplies will cause soaring increases in the price of food. 

“Since the onset of the Ukraine conflict, we have seen the prices of food skyrocket by more than 150 percent,” said Basheer Al Selwi, a spokesperson for the International Commission of the Red Cross in Yemen. “Millions of Yemeni families don't know how to get their next meal.”

The ghastly blockade and bombardment of Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is now entering its eighth year. The United Nations estimated last fall that the Yemen death toll would top 377,000 people by the end of 2021. 

The United States continues to supply spare parts for Saudi/UAE coalition war planes, along with maintenance and a steady flow of armaments. Without this support, the Saudis couldn’t continue their murderous aerial attacks. 

Yet tragically, instead of condemning atrocities committed by the Saudi/UAE invasion, bombing and blockade of Yemen, the United States is cozying up to the leaders of these countries. As sanctions against Russia disrupt global oil sales, the United States is entering talks to become increasingly reliant on Saudi and UAE oil production. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE don’t want to increase their oil production without a U.S. agreement to help them increase their attacks against Yemen.

Human rights groups have decried the Saudi/UAE-led coalition for bombing roadways, fisheries, sewage and sanitation facilities, weddings, funerals and even a children’s school bus. In a recent attack, the Saudis killed sixty African migrants held in a detention center in Saada.  

The Saudi blockade of Yemen has choked off essential imports needed for daily life, forcing the Yemeni people to depend on relief groups for survival.

There is another way. U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Peter De Fazio of Oregon, both Democrats, are now seeking cosponsors for the Yemen War Powers Resolution. It demands that Congress cut military support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition’s war against Yemen. 

On March 12, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, including seven Yemenis – two of them prisoners of war and five of them accused of criticizing the Saudi war against Yemen. 

Just two days after the mass execution, the Gulf Corporation Council, including many of the coalition partners attacking Yemen, announced Saudi willingness to host peace talks in their own capital city of Riyadh, requiring Yemen's Ansar Allah leaders (informally known as Houthis) to risk execution by Saudi Arabia in order to discuss the war. 

The Saudis have long insisted on a deeply flawed U.N. resolution which calls on the Houthi fighters to disarm but never even mentions the U.S. backed Saudi/UAE coalition as being among the warring parties. The Houthis say they will come to the negotiating table but cannot rely on the Saudis as mediators. This seems reasonable, given Saudi Arabia’s vengeful treatment of Yemenis.  

The people of the United States have the right to insist that U.S. foreign policy be predicated on respect for human rights, equitable sharing of resources and an earnest commitment to end all wars. We should urge Congress to use the leverage it has for preventing continued aerial bombardment of Yemen and sponsor Jayapal’s and De Fazio’s forthcoming resolution. 

We can also summon the humility and courage to acknowledge U.S. attacks against Yemeni civilians, make reparations and repair the dreadful systems undergirding our unbridled militarism. 

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The United Nations’ goal was to raise more than $4.2 billion for the people of war-torn Yemen by March 15. But when that deadline rolled around, just $1.3 billion had come in.

“I am deeply disappointed,” said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The people of Yemen need the same level of support and solidarity that we’ve seen for the people of Ukraine. The crisis in Europe will dramatically impact Yemenis’ access to food and fuel, making an already dire situation even worse.”

With Yemen importing more than 35% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, disruption to wheat supplies will cause soaring increases in the price of food.

“Since the onset of the Ukraine conflict, we have seen the prices of food skyrocket by more than 150 percent,” said Basheer Al Selwi, a spokesperson for the International Commission of the Red Cross in Yemen. “Millions of Yemeni families don’t know how to get their next meal.”

The ghastly blockade and bombardment of Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is now entering its eighth year. The United Nations estimated last fall that the Yemen death toll would top 377,000 people by the end of 2021.

The United States continues to supply spare parts for Saudi/UAE coalition war planes, along with maintenance and a steady flow of armaments. Without this support, the Saudis couldn’t continue their murderous aerial attacks.

Yet tragically, instead of condemning atrocities committed by the Saudi/UAE invasion, bombing and blockade of Yemen, the United States is cozying up to the leaders of these countries. As sanctions against Russia disrupt global oil sales, the United States is entering talks to become increasingly reliant on Saudi and UAE oil production. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE don’t want to increase their oil production without a U.S. agreement to help them increase their attacks against Yemen.

Human rights groups have decried the Saudi/UAE-led coalition for bombing roadways, fisheries, sewage and sanitation facilities, weddings, funerals and even a children’s school bus. In a recent attack, the Saudis killed sixty African migrants held in a detention center in Saada.

The Saudi blockade of Yemen has choked off essential imports needed for daily life, forcing the Yemeni people to depend on relief groups for survival.

There is another way. U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Peter De Fazio of Oregon, both Democrats, are now seeking cosponsors for the Yemen War Powers Resolution. It demands that Congress cut military support for the Saudi/UAE-led coalition’s war against Yemen.

On March 12, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, including seven Yemenis – two of them prisoners of war and five of them accused of criticizing the Saudi war against Yemen.

Just two days after the mass execution, the Gulf Corporation Council, including many of the coalition partners attacking Yemen, announced Saudi willingness to host peace talks in their own capital city of Riyadh, requiring Yemen’s Ansar Allah leaders (informally known as Houthis) to risk execution by Saudi Arabia in order to discuss the war.

The Saudis have long insisted on a deeply flawed U.N. resolution which calls on the Houthi fighters to disarm but never even mentions the U.S. backed Saudi/UAE coalition as being among the warring parties. The Houthis say they will come to the negotiating table but cannot rely on the Saudis as mediators. This seems reasonable, given Saudi Arabia’s vengeful treatment of Yemenis.

The people of the United States have the right to insist that U.S. foreign policy be predicated on respect for human rights, equitable sharing of resources and an earnest commitment to end all wars. We should urge Congress to use the leverage it has for preventing continued aerial bombardment of Yemen and sponsor Jayapal’s and De Fazio’s forthcoming resolution.

We can also summon the humility and courage to acknowledge U.S. attacks against Yemeni civilians, make reparations and repair the dreadful systems undergirding our unbridled militarism.

• A shortened version of this article produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post “Thank You for Hearing Our Afghan Pain” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.

When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.

They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.

Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.

After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion dollars of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.

These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:

“Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”

Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”

The Congressmembers added, “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in twenty years of war.”

For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.

After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.

The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”

“After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”

Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.

Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post Abandoning Yemen? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Monday, October 11, marked the official closure of the U.N. Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (also known as the Group of Experts or GEE). For nearly four years, this investigative group examined alleged human rights abuses suffered by Yemenis whose basic rights to food, shelter, safety, health care and education were horribly violated, all while they were bludgeoned by Saudi and U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, and constant warfare since 2014.

This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones.

"This is a major setback for all victims who have suffered serious violations during the armed conflict," the GEE wrote in a statement the day after the U.N. Human Rights Council refused to extend a mandate for continuation of the group's work.  "The Council appears to be abandoning the people of Yemen," the statement says, adding that "Victims of this tragic armed conflict should not be silenced by the decision of a few States."

Prior to the vote, there were indications that Saudi Arabia and its allies, such as Bahrain (which sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council), had increased lobbying efforts worldwide in a bid to do away with the Group of Experts. Actions of the Saudi-led coalition waging war against Yemen had been examined and reported on by the Group of Experts. Last year, the Saudi bid for a seat on the Human Rights Council was rejected, but Bahrain serves as its proxy.

Bahrain is a notorious human rights violator and a staunch member of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-led coalition which buys billions of dollars worth of weaponry from the United States and other countries to bomb Yemen's infrastructure, kill civilians, and displace millions of people.

The Group of Experts was mandated to investigate violations committed by all warring parties. So it's possible that the Ansar Allah leadership, often known as the Houthis, also wished to avoid the group's scrutiny. The Group of Experts' mission has come to an end, but the fear and intimidation faced by Yemeni victims and witnesses continues.

Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni organization established in 2007, advocates for human rights by reporting on issues such as the torture of detainees, grossly unfair trials, patterns of injustice, and starvation by warfare through the destruction of farms and water sources. Mwatana had hoped the U.N. Human Rights Council would grant the Group of Experts a multi-year extension. Members of Mwatana fear their voice will be silenced within the United Nations if the Human Rights Council's decision is an indicator of how much the council cares about Yemenis.

"The GEE is the only independent and impartial mechanism working to deter war crimes and other violations by all parties to the conflict," said Radhya Almutawakel, Chairperson of Mwatana for Human Rights. She believes that doing away with this body will give a green light to continue violations that condemn millions in Yemen to "'unremitting violence, death and constant fear.'"

Without reports from the Yemen Data Project, the causes of the dire conditions in Sirwah could be shrouded in secrecy.

The Yemen Data Project, founded in 2016, is an independent entity aiming to collect data on the conduct of the war in Yemen. Their most recent monthly report tallied the number of air raids in September, which had risen to the highest monthly rate since March.

Sirwah, a district in the Marib province, was—for the ninth consecutive month—the most heavily targeted district in Yemen, with twenty-nine air raids recorded throughout September. To get a sense of scale, imagine a district the size of three city neighborhoods being bombed twenty-nine times in one month.

Intensified fighting has led to large waves of displacement within the governorate, and sites populated by soaring numbers of refugees are routinely impacted by shelling and airstrikes. Pressing humanitarian needs include shelter, food, water, sanitation, hygiene, and medical care. Without reports from the Yemen Data Project, the causes of the dire conditions in Sirwah could be shrouded in secrecy. This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones.

In early 1995, I was among a group of activists who formed a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness to publicly defy economic sanctions against Iraq. Some of us had been in Iraq during the 1991 U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm invasion. The United Nations reported that hundreds of thousands of children under age five had already died and that the economic sanctions contributed to these deaths. We felt compelled to at least try to break the economic sanctions against Iraq by declaring our intent to bring medicines and medical relief supplies to Iraqi hospitals and families.

But to whom would we deliver these supplies?

Voices in the Wilderness founders agreed that we would start by contacting Iraqis in our neighborhoods and also try to connect with groups concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East. So I began asking Iraqi shopkeepers in my Chicago neighborhood for advice; they were understandably quite wary. 

One day, as I walked away from a shopkeeper who had actually given me an extremely helpful phone number for a parish priest in Baghdad, I overheard another customer ask what that was all about. The shopkeeper replied: "Oh, they're just a group of people trying to make a name for themselves."

I felt crestfallen. Now, twenty-six years later, it's easy for me to understand his reaction. Why should anyone trust people as strange as we must have seemed?

No wonder I've felt high regard for the U.N. Group of Experts who went to bat for human rights groups struggling for "street cred" regarding Yemen. 

When Yemeni human rights advocates try to sound the alarm about terrible abuses, they don't just face hurt feelings when met with antagonism. Yemeni human rights activists have been jailed, tortured, and disappeared. Yemen's civil society activists do need to make a name for themselves.

On October 7, the day the U.N. Human Rights Council voted not to continue the role of the Group of Experts with regard to Yemen, the United Nations agreed to set up an investigative group to monitor the Taliban. However, the agreement assured the United States and NATO that abuses committed under their command would not be subject to investigation.

The agreement assured the United States and NATO that abuses committed under their command would not be subject to investigation.

Politicizing U.N. agencies and procedures makes it all the more difficult for people making inquiries to establish trusting relationships with people whose rights should be upheld by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.

When I was approaching shopkeepers for ideas about people we might contact in Iraq, I was just beginning to grapple with Professor Noam Chomsky's essays about "worthy victims" and "unworthy victims."

That second phrase seemed to me a terrible oxymoron. How could a victim of torture, bereavement, hunger, displacement, or disappearance be an "unworthy victim?" Over the next thirty years, I grew to understand the cruel distinction between worthy and unworthy victims.

A powerful country or group can use the plight of "worthy victims" to build support for war or military intervention. The "unworthy victims" also suffer, but because their stories could lead people to question the wisdom of a powerful country's attacks on civilians, stories about those victims are likely to fade away.

Consider, in Afghanistan, the plight of those who survived an August 29 U.S. drone attack against the family of Zamari Ahmadi. Ten members of the family were killed. Seven were children. As of October 13, the family had not yet heard anything from the United States.

I greatly hope Mwatana, The Yemen Data Project, The Yemen Foundation, and all of the journalists and human rights activists passionately involved in opposing the war that rages in Yemen are recognized and become names that occasion respect, gratitude, and support. I hope they'll continue documenting violations and abuse. But I know their work on the ground in Yemen will now be even more dangerous.

Meanwhile, the lobbyists who've served the Saudi government so well have certainly made a name for themselves in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

Grassroots activists committed to ending human rights abuses must uphold solidarity with civil society groups defending human rights in Yemen and Afghanistan. Governments waging war and protecting human rights abusers must immediately end their pernicious practices.

In the United States, peace activists must tell the military contractors, lobbyists, and elected representatives: "Not in our name!" With no strings attached, the U.S. government should be proactive and end war forever.  

This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

“This is a major setback for all victims who have suffered serious violations during the armed conflict,” the GEE wrote in a statement the day after the U.N. Human Rights Council refused to extend a mandate for continuation of the group’s work.  “The Council appears to be abandoning the people of Yemen,” the statement says, adding that “Victims of this tragic armed conflict should not be silenced by the decision of a few States.”

Prior to the vote, there were indications that Saudi Arabia and its allies, such as Bahrain (which sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council), had increased lobbying efforts worldwide in a bid to do away with the Group of Experts. Actions of the Saudi-led coalition waging war against Yemen had been examined and reported on by the Group of Experts. Last year, the Saudi bid for a seat on the Human Rights Council was rejected, but Bahrain serves as its proxy.

Bahrain is a notorious human rights violator and a staunch member of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia-led coalition which buys billions of dollars worth of weaponry from the United States and other countries to bomb Yemen’s infrastructure, kill civilians, and displace millions of people.

The Group of Experts was mandated to investigate violations committed by all warring parties. So it’s possible that the Ansar Allah leadership, often known as the Houthis, also wished to avoid the group’s scrutiny. The Group of Experts’ mission has come to an end, but the fear and intimidation faced by Yemeni victims and witnesses continues.

Mwatana for Human Rights, an independent Yemeni organization established in 2007, advocates for human rights by reporting on issues such as the torture of detainees, grossly unfair trials, patterns of injustice, and starvation by warfare through the destruction of farms and water sources. Mwatana had hoped the U.N. Human Rights Council would grant the Group of Experts a multi-year extension. Members of Mwatana fear their voice will be silenced within the United Nations if the Human Rights Council’s decision is an indicator of how much the council cares about Yemenis.

“The GEE is the only independent and impartial mechanism working to deter war crimes and other violations by all parties to the conflict,” said Radhya Almutawakel, Chairperson of Mwatana for Human Rights. She believes that doing away with this body will give a green light to continue violations that condemn millions in Yemen to “‘unremitting violence, death and constant fear.’”

The Yemen Data Project, founded in 2016, is an independent entity aiming to collect data on the conduct of the war in Yemen. Their most recent monthly report tallied the number of air raids in September, which had risen to the highest monthly rate since March.

Sirwah, a district in the Marib province, was—for the ninth consecutive month—the most heavily targeted district in Yemen, with twenty-nine air raids recorded throughout September. To get a sense of scale, imagine a district the size of three city neighborhoods being bombed twenty-nine times in one month.

Intensified fighting has led to large waves of displacement within the governorate, and sites populated by soaring numbers of refugees are routinely impacted by shelling and airstrikes. Pressing humanitarian needs include shelter, food, water, sanitation, hygiene, and medical care. Without reports from the Yemen Data Project, the causes of the dire conditions in Sirwah could be shrouded in secrecy. This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones.

In early 1995, I was among a group of activists who formed a campaign called Voices in the Wilderness to publicly defy economic sanctions against Iraq. Some of us had been in Iraq during the 1991 U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm invasion. The United Nations reported that hundreds of thousands of children under age five had already died and that the economic sanctions contributed to these deaths. We felt compelled to at least try to break the economic sanctions against Iraq by declaring our intent to bring medicines and medical relief supplies to Iraqi hospitals and families.

But to whom would we deliver these supplies?

Voices in the Wilderness founders agreed that we would start by contacting Iraqis in our neighborhoods and also try to connect with groups concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East. So I began asking Iraqi shopkeepers in my Chicago neighborhood for advice; they were understandably quite wary.

One day, as I walked away from a shopkeeper who had actually given me an extremely helpful phone number for a parish priest in Baghdad, I overheard another customer ask what that was all about. The shopkeeper replied: “Oh, they’re just a group of people trying to make a name for themselves.”

I felt crestfallen. Now, twenty-six years later, it’s easy for me to understand his reaction. Why should anyone trust people as strange as we must have seemed?

No wonder I’ve felt high regard for the U.N. Group of Experts who went to bat for human rights groups struggling for “street cred” regarding Yemen.

When Yemeni human rights advocates try to sound the alarm about terrible abuses, they don’t just face hurt feelings when met with antagonism. Yemeni human rights activists have been jailed, tortured, and disappeared. Yemen’s civil society activists do need to make a name for themselves.

On October 7, the day the U.N. Human Rights Council voted not to continue the role of the Group of Experts with regard to Yemen, the United Nations agreed to set up an investigative group to monitor the Taliban. However, the agreement assured the United States and NATO that abuses committed under their command would not be subject to investigation.

Politicizing U.N. agencies and procedures makes it all the more difficult for people making inquiries to establish trusting relationships with people whose rights should be upheld by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.

When I was approaching shopkeepers for ideas about people we might contact in Iraq, I was just beginning to grapple with Professor Noam Chomsky’s essays about “worthy victims” and “unworthy victims.”

That second phrase seemed to me a terrible oxymoron. How could a victim of torture, bereavement, hunger, displacement, or disappearance be an “unworthy victim?” Over the next thirty years, I grew to understand the cruel distinction between worthy and unworthy victims.

A powerful country or group can use the plight of “worthy victims” to build support for war or military intervention. The “unworthy victims” also suffer, but because their stories could lead people to question the wisdom of a powerful country’s attacks on civilians, stories about those victims are likely to fade away.

Consider, in Afghanistan, the plight of those who survived an August 29 U.S. drone attack against the family of Zamari Ahmadi.  Ten members of the family were killed. Seven were children. As of October 13, the family had not yet heard anything from the United States.

I greatly hope Mwatana, The Yemen Data Project, The Yemen Foundation, and all of the journalists and human rights activists passionately involved in opposing the war that rages in Yemen are recognized and become names that occasion respect, gratitude, and support. I hope they’ll continue documenting violations and abuse. But I know their work on the ground in Yemen will now be even more dangerous.

Meanwhile, the lobbyists who’ve served the Saudi government so well have certainly made a name for themselves in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

Grassroots activists committed to ending human rights abuses must uphold solidarity with civil society groups defending human rights in Yemen and Afghanistan. Governments waging war and protecting human rights abusers must immediately end their pernicious practices.

In the United States, peace activists must tell the military contractors, lobbyists, and elected representatives: “Not in our name!” With no strings attached, the U.S. government should be proactive and end war forever.

This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

Tower houses in Sanaa, August 15, 2013 (Rod Waddington)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post To Counter Terror, Abolish War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center,  U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.

I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.

The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.

I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.

My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.

In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”

For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.

When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation,  military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.

Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?

One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.

The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.

In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.

It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.

Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.

In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and  three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?

On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.

We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.

Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.

Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.

Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree:  To counter terror, abolish war.

• This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center, U.S. Mission to the U.N. officials called us and asked that we visit with them.

I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.

"Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars."

The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following the 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the United States now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.

I last visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account shortly before I arrived about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj in Mecca; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.

My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.

In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”

For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.

When the United States was winding down its troop surge in 2014 — but not its occupation — military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant — helping to prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment — would be 5 cents per child per year.

Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?

One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.  

The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.

In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.

It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.

Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul, where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.

In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and 3 million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?

On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.

We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the United States helped create.

Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.

Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage that says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need people in the United States to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today. Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post Reckoning and Reparations in Afghanistan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Earlier this week, 100 Afghan families from Bamiyan, a rural province of central Afghanistan mainly populated by the Hazara ethnic minority, fled to Kabul. They feared Taliban militants would attack them in Bamiyan.

Over the past decade, I’ve gotten to know a grandmother who recalls fleeing Talib fighters in the 1990s, just after learning that her husband had been killed. Then, she was a young widow with five children, and for several agonizing months two of her sons were missing. I can only imagine the traumatized memories that spurred her to again flee her village today. She is part of the Hazara ethnic minority and hopes to protect her grandchildren.

When it comes to inflicting miseries on innocent Afghan people, there’s plenty of blame to be shared.

The Taliban have demonstrated a pattern of anticipating people who might form opposition to their eventual rule and waging “pre-emptive” attacks against journalists, human rights activists, judicial officials, advocates for women’s rights, and minority groups such as the Hazara.

In places where Taliban have successfully taken over districts, they may be ruling over increasingly resentful populaces; people who have lost harvests, homes, and livestock are already coping with a third wave of COVID-19 and severe drought.

In many northern provinces, the re-emergence of the Taliban can be traced to the Afghan government’s incompetence, and also to criminal and abusive behaviors of the local military commanders, including land grabs, extortion, and rape.

President Ashraf Ghani, showing little empathy for people trying to flee Afghanistan, referred to those who leave as people looking to “have fun.”

Responding to his April 18 speech when he made this comment, a young woman whose sister, a journalist, was recently killed, tweeted about her father who had stayed in Afghanistan for seventy-four years, encouraged his children to stay, and now felt that his daughter might be alive had she left. The surviving daughter said the Afghan government couldn’t protect its people, and that’s why they tried to leave.

President Ghani’s government has encouraged the formation of “Uprising” militias to help protect the country. Immediately, people began questioning how the Afghan government could support new militias when it already lacks ammunition and protection for thousands of Afghan National Defense Forces and local police who have fled their posts.

The main backer of the Uprising Forces, it seems, is the formidable National Directorate of Security, whose main sponsor is the CIA.

Some militia groups have raised money through imposing “taxes” or outright extortion. Others turn to other countries in the region, all of which reinforces cycles of violence and despair.

The staggering loss of landmine removal experts working for the nonprofit HALO Trust should add to our sense of grief and mourning. About 2,600 Afghans working with the demining group had helped make more than 80 percent of Afghanistan’s land safe from unexploded ordnance strewn over the country after forty years of war. Tragically, militants attacked the group, killing ten workers.

Human Rights Watch says the Afghan government has not adequately investigated the attack nor has it investigated the killings of journalists, human rights activists, clerics, and judicial workers that began escalating after the Afghan government began peace talks with the Taliban in April.

Yet, unquestionably, the warring party in Afghanistan with the most sophisticated weapons and seemingly endless access to funds has been the United States. Funds were spent not to lift Afghans to a place of security from which they might have worked to moderate Taliban rule, but to further frustrate them, beating down their hopes of future participatory governance with twenty years of war and brutal impoverishment. The war has been a prelude to the United States’ inevitable retreat and the return of a possibly more enraged and dysfunctional Taliban to rule over a shattered population.

The troop withdrawal negotiated by President Joe Biden and U.S. military officials is not a peace agreement. Rather, it signals the end of an occupation resulting from  an unlawful invasion, and while troops are leaving, the Biden Administration is already laying plans for “over the horizon” drone surveillance, drone strikes, and “manned” aircraft strikes which could exacerbate and prolong the war.

U.S. citizens ought to consider not only financial recompense for destruction caused by twenty years of war but also a commitment to dismantle the warfare systems that brought such havoc, chaos, bereavement, and displacement to Afghanistan.

We should be sorry that, during 2013, when the United States spent an average of $2 million per soldier, per year, stationed in Afghanistan, the number of Afghan children suffering malnutrition rose by 50 percent. At that same time, the cost of adding iodized salt to an Afghan child’s diet to help reduce risks of brain damage caused by hunger would have been 5 cents per child per year.

We should deeply regret that while the United States constructed sprawling military bases in Kabul, populations in refugee camps soared. During harsh winter months, people desperate for warmth in a Kabul refugee camp would burn—and then have to breathe—plastic. Trucks laden with food, fuel, water, and supplies constantly entered the U.S. military base immediately across the road from this camp.

We should acknowledge, with shame, that U.S. contractors signed deals to build hospitals and schools which were later determined to be ghost hospitals and ghost schools, places that never even existed.

On October 3, 2015, when only one hospital served vast numbers of people in the Kunduz province, the U.S. Air Force bombed the hospital at 15 minute intervals for one and a half hours, killing 42 people including 13 staff, three of whom were doctors. This attack helped greenlight the war crime of bombing hospitals all around the world.

More recently, in 2019, migrant workers in Nangarhar were attacked when a drone fired missiles into their overnight camp. The owner of a pine nut forest had hired the laborers, including children, to harvest the pine nuts, and he notified officials ahead of time, hoping to avoid any confusion. 30 of the workers were killed while they were resting after an exhausting day of work. Over 40 people were badly wounded.

U.S. repentance for a regime of attacks by weaponized drones, conducted in Afghanistan and worldwide, along with sorrow for the countless civilians killed, should lead to deep appreciation for Daniel Hale, a drone whistleblower who exposed the widespread and indiscriminate murder of civilians.

Between January 2012 and February 2013, according to an article in The Intercept, these air strikes “killed more than 200 people. Of those, only thirty-five were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”

Under the Espionage Act, Hale faces ten years in prison at his July 27 sentencing.

We should be sorry for night raids that terrified civilians, assassinated innocent people, and were later acknowledged to have been based on faulty information.

We must reckon with how little attention our elected officials ever paid to the quadrennial “Special Inspector General on Afghan Reconstruction” reports which detailed many years’ worth of fraud, corruption, human rights violations and failure to achieve stated goals related to counter-narcotics or confronting corrupt structures.

We should say we’re sorry, we’re so very sorry, for pretending to stay in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons, when, honestly, we understood next to nothing about humanitarian concerns of women and children in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s civilian population has repeatedly demanded peace.

When I think of the generations in Afghanistan who have suffered through war, occupation and the vagaries of warlords, including NATO troops, I wish we could hear the sorrow of the grandmother who now wonders how she might help feed, shelter and protect her family.

Her sorrow should lead to atonement on the part of countries that invaded her land. Every one of those countries could arrange visas and support for each Afghan person who now wants to flee. A reckoning with the massive wreckage this grandmother and her loved ones face should yield equally massive readiness to abolish all wars, forever.

• A version of this article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post Why Whistleblower Daniel Hale Deserves Gratitude, Not Prison appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

These words hung in the air on a recent Saturday evening, projected onto several Washington, D.C. buildings, above the face of a courageous whistleblower facing ten years in prison.  

The artists aimed to inform the U.S. public about Daniel E. Hale, a former Air Force analyst who blew the whistle on the consequences of drone warfare. Hale will appear for sentencing before Judge Liam O'Grady on July 27th.

The U.S. Air Force had assigned Hale to work for the National Security Agency. At one point, he also served in Afghanistan, at the Bagram Air Force Base.

Hale's honesty, courage, and exemplary readiness to act in accord with his conscience are critically needed. Instead, the U.S. government has done its best to silence him.

"In this role as a signals analyst, Hale was involved in the identifying of targets for the US drone program," notes Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights and Dissent, in a lengthy article about Hale's case. "Hale would tell the filmmakers of the 2016 documentary National Bird that he was disturbed by 'the uncertainty if anyone I was involved in kill[ing] or captur[ing] was a civilian or not. There's no way of knowing.'"

Hale, thirty-three, believed the public wasn't getting crucial information about the nature and extent of U.S. drone assassinations of civilians. Lacking that evidence, U.S. people couldn't make informed decisions. Moved by his conscience, he opted to become a truth-teller.

The U.S. government is treating him as a threat, a thief who stole documents, and an enemy. If ordinary people knew more about him, they might regard him as a hero.

Hale was charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly providing classified information to a reporter. The Espionage Act is  an antiquated World War I era law, passed in 1917, designed for use against enemies of the U.S. accused of spying. The U.S. government has dusted it off, more recently, for use against whistle blowers.

Individuals charged under this law are not allowed to raise any issues regarding motivation or intent. They literally are not allowed to explain the basis for their actions.

One observer of whistleblowers' struggles with the courts was himself a whistleblower. Tried and convicted under the Espionage Act, John Kiriakou spent two and a half years in prison for exposing government wrongdoing. He says the U.S. government in these cases engages in "charge stacking" to ensure a lengthy prison term as well as "venue-shopping" to try such cases in the nation's most conservative districts.

Daniel Hale was facing trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, home to the Pentagon as well as many CIA and other federal government agents. He was facing up to 50 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.

On March 31, Hale pled guilty on one count of retention and transmission of national defense information. He now faces a maximum of ten years in prison.

At no point has he been able to raise before a judge his alarm about the Pentagon's false claims that targeted drone assassination is precise and civilian deaths are minimal.

Hale was familiar with details of a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker. He saw evidence that between January 2012 and February 2013, "U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets."

Had he gone to trial, a jury of his peers might have learned more details about consequences of drone attacks. Weaponized drones are typically outfitted with Hellfire missiles, designed for use against vehicles and buildings.

Living Under Drones, the most complete documentation of the human impact of U.S. drone attacks yet produced, reports:

"The most immediate consequence of drone strikes is, of course, death and injury to those targeted or near a strike.  The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs.  Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss."

A new variation of this missile can hurl about 100 pounds of metal through the top of a vehicle or building; the missiles also deploy, just before impact, six long, whirring  blades intended to slice up any person or object in the missile's path.

Any drone operator or analyst should be aghast, as Daniel Hale was, at the possibility of killing and maiming civilians through such grotesque means. But Daniel Hale's ordeal may be intended to send a chilling message to other U.S. government and military analysts: keep quiet. 

Nick Mottern, of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, accompanied artists projecting Hale's image on various walls in D.C. He engaged people who were passing by, asking if they knew of Daniel Hale's case. Not a single person he spoke with had. Nor did anyone know anything about drone warfare.

Now imprisoned at the Alexandria (VA) Adult Detention Center, Hale awaits sentencing.

Supporters urge people to "stand with Daniel Hale." One solidarity action involves writing Judge O'Grady to express gratitude that Hale told the truth about the U.S. use of drones to kill innocent people.

At a time when drone sales and usage are proliferating worldwide and causing increasingly gruesome damage, President Joe Biden continues to launch killer drone attacks around the world, albeit with some new restrictions.

Hale's honesty, courage, and exemplary readiness to act in accord with his conscience are critically needed. Instead, the U.S. government has done its best to silence him.

A version of this article appeared in The Progressive Magazine.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

These words hung in the air on a recent Saturday evening, projected onto several Washington, D.C. buildings, above the face of a courageous whistleblower facing ten years in prison.

The artists aimed to inform the U.S. public about Daniel E. Hale, a former Air Force analyst who blew the whistle on the consequences of drone warfare. Hale will appear for sentencing before Judge Liam O’Grady on July 27th.

The U.S. Air Force had assigned Hale to work for the National Security Agency. At one point, he also served in Afghanistan, at the Bagram Air Force Base.

“In this role as a signals analyst, Hale was involved in the identifying of targets for the US drone program,” notes Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights and Dissent, in a lengthy article about Hale’s case. “Hale would tell the filmmakers of the 2016 documentary National Bird that he was disturbed by ‘the uncertainty if anyone I was involved in kill[ing] or captur[ing] was a civilian or not. There’s no way of knowing.’”

Hale, thirty-three, believed the public wasn’t getting crucial information about the nature and extent of U.S. drone assassinations of civilians. Lacking that evidence, U.S. people couldn’t make informed decisions. Moved by his conscience, he opted to become a truth-teller.

The U.S. government is treating him as a threat, a thief who stole documents, and an enemy. If ordinary people knew more about him, they might regard him as a hero.

Hale was charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly providing classified information to a reporter. The Espionage Act is  an antiquated World War I era law, passed in 1917, designed for use against enemies of the U.S. accused of spying. The U.S. government has dusted it off, more recently, for use against whistle blowers.

Individuals charged under this law are not allowed to raise any issues regarding motivation or intent. They literally are not allowed to explain the basis for their actions.

One observer of whistleblowers’ struggles with the courts was himself a whistleblower. Tried and convicted under the Espionage Act, John Kiriakou spent two and a half years in prison for exposing government wrongdoing. He says the U.S. government in these cases engages in “charge stacking” to ensure a lengthy prison term as well as “venue-shopping” to try such cases in the nation’s most conservative districts.

Daniel Hale was facing trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, home to the Pentagon as well as many CIA and other federal government agents. He was facing up to 50 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.

On March 31, Hale pled guilty on one count of retention and transmission of national defense information. He now faces a maximum of ten years in prison.

At no point has he been able to raise before a judge his alarm about the Pentagon’s false claims that targeted drone assassination is precise and civilian deaths are minimal.

Hale was familiar with details of a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker. He saw evidence that between January 2012 and February 2013, “U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”

Had he gone to trial, a jury of his peers might have learned more details about consequences of drone attacks. Weaponized drones are typically outfitted with Hellfire missiles, designed for use against vehicles and buildings.

Living Under Drones, the most complete documentation of the human impact of U.S. drone attacks yet produced, reports:

The most immediate consequence of drone strikes is, of course, death and injury to those targeted or near a strike.  The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs.  Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.

A new variation of this missile can hurl about 100 pounds of metal through the top of a vehicle or building; the missiles also deploy, just before impact, six long, whirring  blades intended to slice up any person or object in the missile’s path.

Any drone operator or analyst should be aghast, as Daniel Hale was, at the possibility of killing and maiming civilians through such grotesque means. But Daniel Hale’s ordeal may be intended to send a chilling message to other U.S. government and military analysts: keep quiet.

Nick Mottern, of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, accompanied artists projecting Hale’s image on various walls in D.C. He engaged people who were passing by, asking if they knew of Daniel Hale’s case. Not a single person he spoke with had. Nor did anyone know anything about drone warfare.

Now imprisoned at the Alexandria (VA) Adult Detention Center, Hale  awaits sentencing

Supporters urge people to “stand with Daniel Hale.” One solidarity action involves writing Judge O’Grady to express gratitude that Hale told the truth about the U.S. use of drones to kill innocent people.

At a time when drone sales and usage are proliferating worldwide and causing increasingly gruesome damage, President Joe Biden continues to launch killer drone attacks around the world, albeit with some new restrictions.

Hale’s honesty, courage, and exemplary readiness to act in accord with his conscience are critically needed. Instead, the U.S. government has done its best to silence him.

Pedestrians in Washington, D.C. walk past an image of Daniel Hale projected on a D.C. building on June 26, 2021 (Photo Credit:  Nick Mottern)

• A version of this article appeared in The Progressive Magazine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Sam Durant, Untitled (drone), 2016-2021 (rendering). Proposal for the High Line Plinth. Commissioned by High Line Art. Courtesy of the High Line.

At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City,  visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy a park-like openness; with fellow strollers they experience urban beauty, art and the wonder of comradeship.

In late May, a Predator drone replica, appearing suddenly above the High Line promenade at 30^th Street, might seem to scrutinize people below. The “gaze” of the sleek, white sculpture by Sam Durant, called “Untitled, (drone),” in the shape of the U.S. military’s Predator killer drone, will sweep unpredictably over the people below, rotating atop its 25-foot-high steel pole, its direction guided by the wind.

Unlike the real Predator, it won’t carry two Hellfire missiles and a surveillance camera. The drone’s death-delivering features are omitted from Durant’s sculpture. Nevertheless, he hopes it will generate discussion.

“Untitled (drone)” is meant to animate questions “about the use of drones, surveillance, and targeted killings in places far and near,” said Durant in a statement “and whether as a society we agree with and want to continue these practices.”

Durant regards art as a place for exploring possibilities and alternatives.

In 2007, a similar desire to raise questions about remote killing motivated New York artist, Wafaa Bilal, now a professor at NYU’s Tisch Gallery, to lock himself  in a cubicle where, for a month, and at any hour of the day, he could be remotely targeted by a paint-ball gun blast. Anyone on the internet who chose to could shoot at him.

He was shot at more than 60,000 times by people from 128 different countries. Bilal called the project “Domestic Tension.” In a resulting book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art Life and Resistance Under the Gun, Bilal and co-author Kary Lydersen chronicled the remarkable outcome of the “Domestic Tension” project.

Along with descriptions of constant paint-ball attacks against Bilal, they wrote of the internet participants who instead wrestled with the controls to keep Bilal from being shot. And they described the death of Bilal’s brother, Hajj, who was killed by a U.S. air to ground missile in 2004.

Grappling with the terrible vulnerability to sudden death felt by people all across Iraq, Bilal, who grew up in Iraq, with this exhibit chose to partly experience the pervasive fear of being suddenly, and without warning, attacked remotely. He made himself vulnerable to people who might wish him harm.

Three years later, in June of 2010, Bilal developed the “And Counting” art work in which a tattoo artist inked the names of Iraq’s major cities on Bilal’s back. The tattoo artist then used his needle to place “dots of ink, thousands and thousands of them — each representing a casualty of the Iraq war. The dots are tattooed near the city where the person died: red ink for the American soldiers, ultraviolet ink for the Iraqi civilians, invisible unless seen under black light.”

Bilal, Durant and other artists who help us think about U.S. colonial warfare against the people of Iraq and other nations should surely be thanked. It’s helpful to compare Bilal’s and Durant’s projects.

The pristine, unsullied drone may be an apt metaphor for twenty-first-century U.S. warfare which can be entirely remote. Before driving home to dinner with their own loved ones, soldiers on another side of the world can kill suspected militants miles from any battlefield. The people assassinated by drone attacks may themselves be driving along a road, possibly headed toward their family homes.

U.S. technicians analyze miles of surveillance footage from drone cameras, but such surveillance doesn’t disclose information about the people a drone operator targets.

In fact, as Andrew Cockburn wrote in the London Review of Books: “the laws of physics impose inherent restrictions of picture quality from distant drones that no amount of money can overcome. Unless pictured from low altitude and in clear weather, individuals appear as dots, cars as blurry blobs.”

On the other hand, Bilal’s exploration is deeply personal, connoting the anguish of victims. Bilal took great pains, including the pain of tattooing, to name the people whose dots appear on his back, people who had been killed.

Contemplating “Untitled (drone),” it’s unsettling to recall that no one in the U.S. can name the thirty Afghan laborers killed by a U.S. drone in 2019. A U.S. drone operator fired a missile into an encampment of migrant workers resting after a day of harvesting pine nuts in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. An additional 40 people were injured. To U.S. drone pilots, such victims  may appear only as dots.

In many war zones, incredibly brave human rights documentarians risk their lives to record the testimonies of people suffering war-related human rights violations, including drone attacks striking civilians. Mwatana for Human Rights, based in Yemen, researches human rights abuses committed by all sides to the war in Yemen. In their report, Death Falling from the Sky, Civilian Harm from the United States’ Use of Lethal Force in Yemen, they examine 12 U.S. aerial attacks in Yemen, 10 of them U.S. drone strikes, between 2017 and 2019.

They report at least 38 Yemeni civilians—nineteen men, thirteen children, and six women—were killed and seven others were injured in the attacks.

From the report, we learn of important roles the slain victims played as family and community members. We read of families bereft of income after the killing of wage earners, including beekeepers, fishers, laborers and drivers. Students described one of the men killed as a beloved teacher. Also among the dead were university students and housewives. Loved ones who mourn the deaths of those killed still fear hearing the hum of a drone.

Now it’s clear that the Houthis in Yemen have been able to use 3-D models to create their own drones which they have fired across a border, hitting targets in Saudi Arabia. This kind of proliferation has been entirely predictable.

The U.S. recently announced plans to sell the United Arab Emirates fifty F-35 fighter jets, eighteen Reaper drones, and various missiles, bombs and munitions. The UAE has used its weapons against its own people and has run ghastly clandestine prisons in Yemen where people are tortured and broken as human beings, a fate awaiting any Yemeni critic of their power.

The installation of a drone overlooking people in Manhattan can bring them into the larger discussion.

Outside of many military bases safely within the U.S. – from which drones are piloted to deal death over Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and other lands, activists have repeatedly staged artistic events. In 2011, at Hancock Field in Syracuse, thirty-eight activists were arrested for a “die-in” during which they simply lay down, at the gate, covering themselves with bloodied sheets.

The title of Sam Durant’s sculpture – “Untitled (drone)” – means that in a sense it is officially nameless, like so many of the victims of the U.S. Predator drones it is designed to resemble.

People in many parts of the world can’t speak up. Comparatively, we don’t face torture or death for protesting. We can tell the stories of the people being killed now by our drones, or watching the skies in terror of them.

We should tell those stories, those realities, to our elected representatives, to faith-based communities, to academics, to media and to our family and friends. And if you know anyone in New York City, please tell them to be on the lookout for a Predator drone in lower Manhattan. This pretend drone could help us grapple with reality and accelerate an international push to ban killer drones.

A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.org

Photo credit:  Sam Durant, Untitled (drone), 2016-2021 (rendering). Proposal for the High Line Plinth. Commissioned by High Line Art. Courtesy of the High Line

The post Art Against Drones appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post Art Against Drones appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

The post Art Against Drones appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

In late May, a Predator drone replica, appearing suddenly above the High Line promenade at 30th Street, might seem to scrutinize people below. The “gaze” of the sleek, white sculpture by Sam Durant, called “Untitled, (drone),” in the shape of the U.S. military’s Predator killer drone, will sweep unpredictably over the people below, rotating atop its 25-foot-high steel pole, its direction guided by the wind.

Unlike the real Predator, it won’t carry two Hellfire missiles and a surveillance camera. The drone’s death-delivering features are omitted from Durant’s sculpture. Nevertheless, he hopes it will generate discussion.

“Untitled (drone)” is meant to animate questions “about the use of drones, surveillance, and targeted killings in places far and near,” said Durant in a statement “and whether as a society we agree with and want to continue these practices.”

Durant regards art as a place for exploring possibilities and alternatives.

In 2007, a similar desire to raise questions about remote killing motivated New York artist, Wafaa Bilal, now a professor at NYU’s Tisch Gallery, to lock himself  in a cubicle where, for a month, and at any hour of the day, he could be remotely targeted by a paint-ball gun blast. Anyone on the internet who chose to could shoot at him.

He was shot at more than 60,000 times by people from 128 different countries. Bilal called the project “Domestic Tension.” In a resulting book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art Life and Resistance Under the Gun, Bilal and co-author Kary Lydersen chronicled the remarkable outcome of the “Domestic Tension” project.

Along with descriptions of constant paint-ball attacks against Bilal, they wrote of the internet participants who instead wrestled with the controls to keep Bilal from being shot. And they described the death of Bilal’s brother, Hajj, who was killed by a U.S. air-to-ground missile in 2004.

Grappling with the terrible vulnerability to sudden death felt by people all across Iraq, Bilal, who grew up in Iraq, with this exhibit chose to partly experience the pervasive fear of being suddenly, and without warning, attacked remotely. He made himself vulnerable to people who might wish him harm.

Three years later, in June of 2010, Bilal developed the “And Counting” art work in which a tattoo artist inked the names of Iraq’s major cities on Bilal’s back. The tattoo artist then used his needle to place “dots of ink, thousands and thousands of them — each representing a casualty of the Iraq war. The dots are tattooed near the city where the person died: red ink for the American soldiers, ultraviolet ink for the Iraqi civilians, invisible unless seen under black light.”

Bilal, Durant and other artists who help us think about U.S. colonial warfare against the people of Iraq and other nations should surely be thanked. It’s helpful to compare Bilal’s and Durant’s projects.

The pristine, unsullied drone may be an apt metaphor for twenty-first-century U.S. warfare which can be entirely remote. Before driving home to dinner with their own loved ones, soldiers on another side of the world can kill suspected militants miles from any battlefield. The people assassinated by drone attacks may themselves be driving along a road, possibly headed toward their family homes.

U.S. technicians analyze miles of surveillance footage from drone cameras, but such surveillance doesn’t disclose information about the people a drone operator targets.

In fact, as Andrew Cockburn wrote in the London Review of Books: “the laws of physics impose inherent restrictions of picture quality from distant drones that no amount of money can overcome. Unless pictured from low altitude and in clear weather, individuals appear as dots, cars as blurry blobs.”

On the other hand, Bilal’s exploration is deeply personal, connoting the anguish of victims. Bilal took great pains, including the pain of tattooing, to name the people whose dots appear on his back, people who had been killed.

Contemplating “Untitled (drone),” it’s unsettling to recall that no one in the U.S. can name the thirty Afghan laborers killed by a U.S. drone in 2019. A U.S. drone operator fired a missile into an encampment of migrant workers resting after a day of harvesting pine nuts in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. An additional 40 people were injured. To U.S. drone pilots, such victims  may appear only as dots.

In many war zones, incredibly brave human rights documentarians risk their lives to record the testimonies of people suffering war-related human rights violations, including drone attacks striking civilians. Mwatana for Human Rights, based in Yemen, researches human rights abuses committed by all sides to the war in Yemen. In their report, Death Falling from the Sky, Civilian Harm from the United States’ Use of Lethal Force in Yemen, they examine 12 U.S. aerial attacks in Yemen, 10 of them U.S. drone strikes, between 2017 and 2019.

They report at least 38 Yemeni civilians—nineteen men, thirteen children, and six women—were killed and seven others were injured in the attacks.

From the report, we learn of important roles the slain victims played as family and community members. We read of families bereft of income after the killing of wage earners, including beekeepers, fishers, laborers and drivers. Students described one of the men killed as a beloved teacher. Also among the dead were university students and housewives. Loved ones who mourn the deaths of those killed still fear hearing the hum of a drone.

Now it’s clear that the Houthis in Yemen have been able to use 3-D models to create their own drones which they have fired across a border, hitting targets in Saudi Arabia. This kind of proliferation has been entirely predictable.

The U.S. recently announced plans to sell the United Arab Emirates fifty F-35 fighter jets, eighteen Reaper drones, and various missiles, bombs and munitions. The UAE has used its weapons against its own people and has run ghastly clandestine prisons in Yemen where people are tortured and broken as human beings, a fate awaiting any Yemeni critic of their power.

The installation of a drone overlooking people in Manhattan can bring them into the larger discussion.

Outside of many military bases safely within the U.S. – from which drones are piloted to deal death over Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and other lands, activists have repeatedly staged artistic events. In 2011, at Hancock Field in Syracuse, thirty-eight activists were arrested for a “die-in” during which they simply lay down, at the gate, covering themselves with bloodied sheets.

The title of Sam Durant’s sculpture – “Untitled (drone)” – means that in a sense it is officially nameless; like so many of the victims of the U.S. Predator drones it is designed to resemble.

People in many parts of the world can’t speak up. Comparatively, we don’t face torture or death for protesting. We can tell the stories of the people being killed now by our drones, or watching the skies in terror of them.

We should tell those stories, those realities, to our elected representatives, to faith-based communities, to academics, to media and to our family and friends. And if you know anyone in New York City, please tell them to be on the lookout for a Predator drone in lower Manhattan. This pretend drone could help us grapple with reality and accelerate an international push to ban killer drones.

• A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.org

Photo credit:  Sam Durant, Untitled (drone), 2016-2021 (rendering). Proposal for the High Line Plinth. Commissioned by High Line Art. Courtesy of the High Line

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Iman Saleh (with drum) on hunger strike  in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen; seated next to her is Rep. Ilhan Omar. Photo: Hassan El-Tayyab.

Since March 29^th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

“When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course began with a focus on Yemen.

As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing  Yemen in devastating war.

Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid  by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

In response, Coe wrote:

ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was  United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been  drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

“The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

“When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

In response, Coe wrote:

ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

“The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

This article was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2021 at 1:41am and is filed under Activism, Children/Youth, Crimes against Humanity, Hunger, Hunger Strikes, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism (state and retail), United States, War Crimes, War Industry, Yemen.

Amid the ongoing horror, it’s important to find ways to atone for war crimes —including reparations.

Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, I was a member of the Gulf Peace Team. We were 73 people from 15 different countries, aged 22 to 76, living in a tent camp close to Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia, along the road to Mecca.

We aimed to nonviolently interpose ourselves between the warring parties. Soldiers are called upon to risk their lives for a cause they may not know much about. Why not ask peace activists to take risks on behalf of preventing and opposing wars?

So we witnessed the dismal onset of the air war at 3 a.m. on 17 January 1991, huddled under blankets, hearing distant explosions and watching anxiously as war planes flew overhead. With so many fighter jets crossing the skies, we wondered if there would be anything left of Baghdad.

Ten days later, Iraqi authorities told us we must pack up, readying for a morning departure to Baghdad. Not all of us could agree on how to respond. Adhering to basic principles, 12 peace team members resolved to sit in a circle, holding signs saying “We choose to stay.”

Buses arrived the next morning, along with two Iraqi civilians and two soldiers. Tarak, a civilian, was in charge, under orders to follow a timetable for the evacuation. Looking at the circle of 12, Tarak seemed a bit baffled. He walked over to where I stood. “Excuse me, Ms. Kathy,” he asked, “but what am I to do?”

“No one in that circle means you any harm,” I assured him. “And no one wishes to disrespect you, but they won’t be able board the bus on their own. It’s a matter of conscience.”

Tarak nodded and then motioned to the other Iraqis who followed him as he approached Jeremy Hartigan, the tallest person sitting in the circle. Jeremy, an elderly UK lawyer and also a Buddhist, was chanting a prayer as he sat with his sign.

Tarak bent over Jeremy, kissed him on the forehead, and said, ”Baghdad!” Then he pointed to the bus. Next, he, the other civilian and two Iraqi soldiers carefully hoisted  Jeremy, still in his cross-legged position, and carried him to the top step of the bus. Gently placing him down, Tarak then asked,  “Mister, you okay?!” And in this manner they proceeded to evacuate the remaining 11 people in the circle.

Another evacuation was happening as Iraqi forces, many of them young conscripts, hungry, disheveled and unarmed, poured out of Kuwait along a major highway, later called “the Highway of Death.”

Boxed in by U.S. forces, many Iraqis abandoned their vehicles and ran away from what had become a huge and very dangerous traffic jam. Iraqis attempting to surrender were stuck in a long line of Iraqi military vehicles. They were systematically slaughtered.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot of the air attack. Another called it “a turkey shoot.”

Days earlier, on February 24^th, the United States Army forces buried scores of living Iraqi soldiers in trenches. According to The New York Times, Army officials said “the Iraqi soldiers who died remained in their trenches as plow-equipped tanks dumped tons of earth and sand onto them, filling the trenches to ensure that they could not be used as cover from which to fire on allied units that were poised to pour through the gaps.”

Shortly after viewing photos of gruesome carnage caused by the ground and air attacks, President George H.W. Bush called for a cessation of hostilities on February 27^th, 1991. An official cease fire was signed on March 4.

It’s ironic that in October of 1990, Bush had asserted that the U.S. would never stand by and let a larger country swallow a smaller country. His country had just invaded Grenada and Panama, and as President Bush spoke, the U.S. military pre-positioned at three Saudi ports hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft, and millions of tons of equipment and fuel in preparation to invade Iraq.

Noam Chomsky notes that there were diplomatic alternatives to the bloodletting and destruction visited upon Iraq by Operation Desert Storm. Iraqi diplomats had submitted an alternative plan which was suppressed in the mainstream media and flatly rejected by the U.S.

The U.S. State Department, along with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the United Kingdom, were hell-bent on moving ahead with their war plans. “This was no time to go wobbly,” U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously warned Bush.

The resolve to attack and punish Iraqis never ceased.

After the “success” of Operation Desert Storm, the bombing war turned into an economic war, which lasted through 2003. As early as 1995, United Nations documents clarified that the economic war, waged through continued imposition of U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, was far more brutal than even the worst of the 1991 aerial and ground war attacks.

In 1995, two Food and Agriculture Organization scientists estimated that more than half a million Iraqi children under age five had likely died due to economic sanctions.

In February, 1998, while visiting a hospital in Baghdad, I watched two friends from the United Kingdom trying to absorb the horror of seeing children being starved to death because of policy decisions made by governments in the UK and the U.S. Martin Thomas, himself a nurse, looked at mothers sitting cross legged, holding their limp and dying infants, in a ward where helpless doctors and nurses tried to treat many dozens of children.

“I think I understand,” said Thomas. “It’s a death row for infants.” Milan Rai, now editor of Peace News and then the coordinator of a U.K. campaign to defy the economic sanctions, knelt next to one of the mothers. Rai’s own child was close in age to the toddler the mother cradled. “I’m sorry,” Rai murmured. “I’m so very sorry.”

Those six words whispered by Milan Rai, are, I believe, incalculably important.

If only people in the U.S. and the UK could take those words to heart, undertaking to finally pressure their governments to echo these words and themselves say, “We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry.”

We’re sorry for coldly viewing your land as a “target rich environment” and then systematically destroying your electrical facilities, sewage and sanitation plants, roads, bridges, infrastructure, health care, education, and livelihood. We’re sorry for believing we somehow had a right to the oil in your land, and we’re sorry many of us lived so well because we were consuming your precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate prices.

We’re sorry for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of your children through economic sanctions and then expecting you to thank us for liberating you. We’re sorry for wrongfully accusing you of harboring weapons of mass destruction while we looked the other way as Israel acquired thermonuclear weapons.

We’re sorry for again traumatizing your children through the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, filling your broken down hospitals with maimed and bereaved survivors of the vicious bombing and then causing enormous wreckage through our inept and criminal occupation of your land.

We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry. And we want to pay reparations.

From March 5 – 8, Pope Francis will visit Iraq. Security concerns are high, and I won’t begin to second guess the itinerary that has been developed. But knowing of his eloquent and authentic plea to end wars and stop the pernicious weapons trade, I wish he could kneel and kiss the ground at the Ameriyah shelter in Baghdad.

There, on February 13, 1991, two 2,000 lb. U.S. laser guided missiles killed 400 civilians, mostly women and children. Another 200 were severely wounded. I wish President Joe Biden could meet the Pope there and ask him to hear his confession.

I wish people around the world could be represented by the Pope as a symbol of unity expressing collective sorrow for making war after hideous war, in Iraq, against people who meant us no harm.

Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, I was a member of the Gulf Peace Team. We were 73 people from fifteen different countries, aged 22 to 76, living in a tent camp close to Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia, along the road to Mecca.

We aimed to nonviolently interpose ourselves between the warring parties. Soldiers are called upon to risk their lives for a cause they may not know much about. Why not ask peace activists to take risks on behalf of preventing and opposing wars?

So we witnessed the dismal onset of the air war at 3:00 a.m. on January 17, 1991, huddled under blankets, hearing distant explosions and watching anxiously as war planes flew overhead. With so many fighter jets crossing the skies, we wondered if there would be anything left of Baghdad.

Ten days later, Iraqi authorities told us we must pack up, readying for a morning departure to Baghdad. Not all of us could agree on how to respond. Adhering to basic principles, twelve peace team members resolved to sit in a circle, holding signs saying “We choose to stay.”

Buses arrived the next morning, along with two Iraqi civilians and two soldiers. Tarak, a civilian, was in charge, under orders to follow a timetable for the evacuation. Looking at the circle of twelve, Tarak seemed a bit baffled. He walked over to where I stood. “Excuse me, Ms. Kathy,” he asked, “but what am I to do?”

“No one in that circle means you any harm,” I assured him. “And no one wishes to disrespect you, but they won’t be able board the bus on their own. It’s a matter of conscience.”

Tarak nodded and then motioned to the other Iraqis who followed him as he approached Jeremy Hartigan, the tallest person sitting in the circle. Jeremy, an elderly UK lawyer and also a Buddhist, was chanting a prayer as he sat with his sign.

Tarak bent over Jeremy, kissed him on the forehead, and said, ”Baghdad!” Then he pointed to the bus.

Next, he, the other civilian and two Iraqi soldiers carefully hoisted  Jeremy, still in his cross-legged position, and carried him to the top step of the bus. Gently placing him down, Tarak then asked,  “Mister, you okay?!” And in this manner they proceeded to evacuate the remaining eleven people in the circle.

Another evacuation was happening as Iraqi forces, many of them young conscripts, hungry, disheveled and unarmed, poured out of Kuwait along a major highway, later called “the Highway of Death.”

Boxed in by U.S. forces, many Iraqis abandoned their vehicles and ran away from what had become a huge and very dangerous traffic jam. Iraqis attempting to surrender were stuck in a long line of Iraqi military vehicles. They were systematically slaughtered.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot of the air attack. Another called it “a turkey shoot.”

Days earlier, on February 24th, the United States Army forces buried scores of living Iraqi soldiers in trenches. According to The New York Times, Army officials said “the Iraqi soldiers who died remained in their trenches as plow-equipped tanks dumped tons of earth and sand onto them, filling the trenches to ensure that they could not be used as cover from which to fire on allied units that were poised to pour through the gaps.”

Shortly after viewing photos of gruesome carnage caused by the ground and air attacks, President George H.W. Bush called for a cessation of hostilities on February 27th, 1991. An official cease fire was signed on March 4.

It’s ironic that in October of 1990, Bush had asserted that the U.S. would never stand by and let a larger country swallow a smaller country. His country had just invaded Grenada and Panama, and as President Bush spoke, the U.S. military pre-positioned at three Saudi ports hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft, and millions of tons of equipment and fuel in preparation to invade Iraq.

Noam Chomsky notes that there were diplomatic alternatives to the bloodletting and destruction visited upon Iraq by Operation Desert Storm. Iraqi diplomats had submitted an alternative plan which was suppressed in the mainstream media and flatly rejected by the U.S.

The U.S. State Department, along with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the United Kingdom, were hell-bent on moving ahead with their war plans. “This was no time to go wobbly,” U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously warned Bush.

The resolve to attack and punish Iraqis never ceased.

After the “success” of Operation Desert Storm, the bombing war turned into an economic war, which lasted through 2003. As early as 1995, United Nations documents clarified that the economic war, waged through continued imposition of U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, was far more brutal than even the worst of the 1991 aerial and ground war attacks.

In 1995, two Food and Agriculture Organization scientists estimated that more than half a million Iraqi children under age five had likely died due to economic sanctions.

In February, 1998, while visiting a hospital in Baghdad, I watched two friends from the United Kingdom trying to absorb the horror of seeing children being starved to death because of policy decisions made by governments in the UK and the U.S. Martin Thomas, himself a nurse, looked at mothers sitting cross legged, holding their limp and dying infants, in a ward where helpless doctors and nurses tried to treat many dozens of children.

“I think I understand,” said Thomas. “It’s a death row for infants.” Milan Rai, now editor of Peace News and then the coordinator of a U.K. campaign to defy the economic sanctions, knelt next to one of the mothers. Rai’s own child was close in age to the toddler the mother cradled. “I’m sorry,” Rai murmured. “I’m so very sorry.”

Those six words whispered by Milan Rai, are, I believe, incalculably important.

If only people in the U.S. and the UK could take those words to heart, undertaking to finally pressure their governments to echo these words and themselves say, “We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry.”

We’re sorry for coldly viewing your land as a “target rich environment” and then systematically destroying your electrical facilities, sewage and sanitation plants, roads, bridges, infrastructure, health care, education, and livelihood. We’re sorry for believing we somehow had a right to the oil in your land, and we’re sorry many of us lived so well because we were consuming your precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate prices.

We’re sorry for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of your children through economic sanctions and then expecting you to thank us for liberating you. We’re sorry for wrongfully accusing you of harboring weapons of mass destruction while we looked the other way as Israel acquired thermonuclear weapons.

We’re sorry for again traumatizing your children through the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, filling your broken down hospitals with maimed and bereaved survivors of the vicious bombing and then causing enormous wreckage through our inept and criminal occupation of your land.

We’re sorry. We’re so very sorry. And we want to pay reparations.

From March 5 – 8, Pope Francis will visit Iraq. Security concerns are high, and I won’t begin to second guess the itinerary that has been developed. But knowing of his eloquent and authentic plea to end wars and stop the pernicious weapons trade, I wish he could kneel and kiss the ground at the Ameriyah shelter in Baghdad.

There, on February 13, 1991, two 2,000 lb. U.S. laser guided missiles killed 400 civilians, mostly women and children. Another 200 were severely wounded. I wish President Joe Biden could meet the Pope there and ask him to hear his confession.

I wish people around the world could be represented by the Pope as a symbol of unity expressing collective sorrow for making war after hideous war, in Iraq, against people who meant us no harm.

Illustration courtesy of Sallie Latch

• A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.org 

This article was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021 at 12:44pm and is filed under Activism, Bombs, Children/Youth, Crimes against Humanity, Iraq, Joe Biden, Lies, Militarism, Sanctions, Solidarity, UK Military, United Kingdom, US Military, US War Crimes, War Crimes, War Industry.

The Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Bruegel.

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder created “The Massacre of the Innocents,” a provocative masterpiece of religious art. The painting reworks a biblical narrative about King Herod’s order to slaughter all newborn boys in Bethlehem for fear that a messiah had been born there. Bruegel’s painting situates the atrocity in a contemporary setting, a 16^th Century Flemish village under attack by heavily armed soldiers. Depicting multiple episodes of gruesome brutality, Bruegel conveys the terror and grief inflicted on trapped villagers who cannot protect their children. Uncomfortable with the images of child slaughter, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, after acquiring the painting, ordered another reworking. The slaughtered babies were painted over with images such as bundles of food or small animals, making the scene appear to be one of plunder rather than massacre.

Were Bruegel’s anti-war theme updated to convey images of child slaughter today, a remote Yemeni village could be the focus. Soldiers performing the slaughter wouldn’t arrive on horseback. Today, they often are Saudi pilots trained to fly U.S.-made warplanes over civilian locales and then launch laser-guided missiles (sold by Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin), to disembowel, decapitate, maim, or kill anyone in the path of the blast and exploding shards.

For more than five years, Yemenis have faced near-famine conditions while enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.

Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the UN reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.

Equipped with U.S.-manufactured Littoral Combat Ships, the Saudis have been able to blockade air and sea ports that are vital to feeding the most populated part of Yemen – the northern area where 80 percent of the population lives. This area is controlled by Ansar Allah, (also known as the “Houthi”). The tactics being used to unseat Ansar Allah severely punish vulnerable people –those who are impoverished, displaced, hungry and stricken with diseases. Many are children who must never be held accountable for political deeds.

Yemeni children are not “starving children;” they are being starved by warring parties whose blockades and bomb attacks have decimated the country. The United States is supplying devastating weaponry and diplomatic support to the Saudi-led coalition, while additionally launching its own “selective” aerial attacks against suspected terrorists and all the civilians in those suspects’ vicinity.

Meanwhile the U.S., like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has cut back on its contributions to humanitarian relief. This severely affects the coping capacity of international donors.

For several months at the end of 2020, the U.S. threatened to designate Ansar Allah as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO). Even the threat of doing so began affecting uncertain trade negotiations, causing prices of desperately needed goods to rise.

On November 16, 2020, five CEOs of major international humanitarian groups jointly wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo, urging him not to make this designation. Numerous organizations with extensive experience working in Yemen described the catastrophic effects such a designation would have on delivery of desperately needed humanitarian relief.

Nevertheless, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced, late in the day on Sunday, January 10^th, his intent to go ahead with the designation.

Senator Chris Murphy termed this FTO designation a “death sentence” for thousands of Yemenis. “90% of Yemen’s food is imported,” he noted, “and even humanitarian waivers will not allow commercial imports, essentially cutting off food for the entire country.”

U.S. leaders and much of the mainstream media responded vigorously to the shocking insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and the tragic loss of multiple lives as it occurred; it is difficult to understand why the Trump Administration’s ongoing massacre of the innocents in Yemen has failed to generate outrage and deep sorrow.

On January 13, journalist Iona Craig noted that the process of delisting a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” – removing it from the FTO list – has never been achieved within a timeframe of less than two years. If the designation goes through, it could take two years to reverse the terrifying cascade of ongoing consequences.

The Biden administration should immediately pursue a reversal. This war began the last time Joseph Biden was in office. It must end now: two years is time Yemen doesn’t have.

Sanctions and blockades are devastating warfare, cruelly leveraging hunger and possible famine as a tool of war. Leading up to the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, U.S. insistence on comprehensive economic sanctions primarily punished Iraq’s most vulnerable people, especially the children. Hundreds of thousands of children died tortuous deaths, bereft of medicines and adequate health care.

Throughout those years, successive U.S. administrations, with a mainly cooperative media, created the impression that they were only trying to punish Saddam Hussein. But the message they sent to governing bodies throughout the world was unmistakable: if you do not subordinate your country to serve our national interest, we will crush your children.

Yemen hadn’t always gotten this message. When the United States sought United Nations’ approval for its earlier 1991 war against Iraq, Yemen was occupying a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. It surprisingly voted then against the wishes of a United States, whose wars of choice around the Middle East were slowly accelerating.

“That will be the most expensive ‘No’ vote you ever cast,” was the U.S. ambassador’s chilling response to Yemen.

Today, children in Yemen are being starved by monarchs and presidents colluding to control land and resources. “The Houthis, who control a large part of their nation, are no threat whatsoever to the United States or to American citizens,” declares James North, writing for Mondoweiss. “Pompeo is making the declaration because the Houthis are backed by Iran, and Trump’s allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel want this declaration as part of their aggressive campaign against Iran.”

Children are not terrorists. But a massacre of the innocents is terror. As of January 19, 2021, 268 organizations have signed a statement demanding an end to the war on Yemen. On January 25, “The World Says No to War Against Yemen” actions will be held worldwide.

It was of another painting of Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus, that the poet W.H. Auden wrote:

About suffering they were never wrong,
the Old Masters:…
how it takes place
while someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along…
how everything turns away
quite leisurely from the disaster…”

This painting concerned the death of one child. In Yemen, the United States –through its regional allies, — could end up killing many hundreds of thousands more. Yemen’s children cannot protect themselves; in the direst cases of severe acute malnourishment, they are too weak even to cry.

We must not turn away. We must decry the terrible war and blockade. Doing so may help spare the lives of at least some of Yemen’s children. The opportunity to resist this massacre of the innocents rests with us.

This article first appeared on the website of The Progressive Magazine

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder created “The Massacre of the Innocents,” a provocative masterpiece of religious art. The painting reworks a biblical narrative about King Herod’s order to slaughter all newborn boys in Bethlehem for fear that a messiah had been born there. Bruegel’s painting situates the atrocity in a contemporary setting, a 16th Century Flemish village under attack by heavily armed soldiers. Depicting multiple episodes of gruesome brutality, Bruegel conveys the terror and grief inflicted on trapped villagers who cannot protect their children. Uncomfortable with the images of child slaughter, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, after acquiring the painting, ordered another reworking. The slaughtered babies were painted over with images such as bundles of food or small animals, making the scene appear to be one of plunder rather than massacre.

Were Bruegel’s anti-war theme updated to convey images of child slaughter today, a remote Yemeni village could be the focus. Soldiers performing the slaughter wouldn’t arrive on horseback. Today, they often are Saudi pilots trained to fly U.S.-made warplanes over civilian locales and then launch laser-guided missiles (sold by Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin), to disembowel, decapitate, maim, or kill anyone in the path of the blast and exploding shards.

For more than five years, Yemenis have faced near-famine conditions while enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.

Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the UN reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.

Equipped with U.S.-manufactured Littoral Combat Ships, the Saudis have been able to blockade air and sea ports that are vital to feeding the most populated part of Yemen – the northern area where 80 percent of the population lives. This area is controlled by Ansar Allah, (also known as the “Houthi”). The tactics being used to unseat Ansar Allah severely punish vulnerable people — those who are impoverished, displaced, hungry and stricken with diseases. Many are children who must never be held accountable for political deeds.

Yemeni children are not “starving children;” they are being starved by warring parties whose blockades and bomb attacks have decimated the country. The United States is supplying devastating weaponry and diplomatic support to the Saudi-led coalition, while additionally launching its own “selective” aerial attacks against suspected terrorists and all the civilians in those suspects’ vicinity.

Meanwhile the U.S., like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has cut back on its contributions to humanitarian relief. This severely affects the coping capacity of international donors.

For several months at the end of 2020, the U.S. threatened to designate Ansar Allah as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO). Even the threat of doing so began affecting uncertain trade negotiations, causing prices of desperately needed goods to rise.

On November 16, 2020, five CEOs of major international humanitarian groups jointly wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo, urging him not to make this designation. Numerous organizations with extensive experience working in Yemen described the catastrophic effects such a designation would have on delivery of desperately needed humanitarian relief.

Nevertheless, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced, late in the day on Sunday, January 10th, his intent to go ahead with the designation.

Senator Chris Murphy termed this FTO designation a “death sentence” for thousands of Yemenis. “90% of Yemen’s food is imported,” he noted, “and even humanitarian waivers will not allow commercial imports, essentially cutting off food for the entire country.”

U.S. leaders and much of the mainstream media responded vigorously to the shocking insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and the tragic loss of multiple lives as it occurred; it is difficult to understand why the Trump Administration’s ongoing massacre of the innocents in Yemen has failed to generate outrage and deep sorrow.

On January 13, journalist Iona Craig noted that the process of delisting a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” – removing it from the FTO list – has never been achieved within a time-frame of less than two years. If the designation goes through, it could take two years to reverse the terrifying cascade of ongoing consequences.

The Biden administration should immediately pursue a reversal. This war began the last time Joseph Biden was in office. It must end now: two years is time Yemen doesn’t have.

Sanctions and blockades are devastating warfare, cruelly leveraging hunger and possible famine as a tool of war. Leading up to the 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, U.S. insistence on comprehensive economic sanctions primarily punished Iraq’s most vulnerable people, especially the children. Hundreds of thousands of children died tortuous deaths, bereft of medicines and adequate health care.

Throughout those years, successive U.S. administrations, with a mainly cooperative media, created the impression that they were only trying to punish Saddam Hussein. But the message they sent to governing bodies throughout the world was unmistakable: if you do not subordinate your country to serve our national interest, we will crush your children.

Yemen hadn’t always gotten this message. When the United States sought United Nations’ approval for its earlier 1991 war against Iraq, Yemen was occupying a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. It surprisingly voted then against the wishes of a United States, whose wars of choice around the Middle East were slowly accelerating.

“That will be the most expensive ‘No’ vote you ever cast,” was the U.S. ambassador’s chilling response to Yemen.

Today, children in Yemen are being starved by monarchs and presidents colluding to control land and resources. “The Houthis, who control a large part of their nation, are no threat whatsoever to the United States or to American citizens,” declares James North, writing for Mondoweiss. “Pompeo is making the declaration because the Houthis are backed by Iran, and Trump’s allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel want this declaration as part of their aggressive campaign against Iran.”

Children are not terrorists. But a massacre of the innocents is terror. As of January 19, 2021, 268 organizations have signed a statement demanding an end to the war on Yemen. On January 25, “The World Says No to War Against Yemen” actions will be held worldwide.

It was of another painting of Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus, that the poet W.H. Auden wrote:

About suffering they were never wrong,
the Old Masters:…
how it takes place
while someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along…
how everything turns away
quite leisurely from the disaster…

This painting concerned the death of one child. In Yemen, the United States — through its regional allies, — could end up killing many hundreds of thousands more. Yemen’s children cannot protect themselves; in the direst cases of severe acute malnourishment, they are too weak even to cry.

We must not turn away. We must decry the terrible war and blockade. Doing so may help spare the lives of at least some of Yemen’s children. The opportunity to resist this massacre of the innocents rests with us.

• This article first appeared on the website of The Progressive Magazine

This article was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2021 at 3:08pm and is filed under Children’s Rights, Children/Youth, Hunger, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, United States, US Military, US War Crimes, Yemen.

Photograph Source: RAWA – CC BY 3.0

People in the United States continue to pretend that the despair and futility we’ve caused isn’t our fault.

Late last week, I learned from young Afghan Peace Volunteer friends in Kabul that an insurgent group firing rockets into the city center hit the home of one volunteer’s relatives. Everyone inside was killed. Today, word arrived of two bomb blasts in the marketplace city of Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, killing at least fourteen people and wounding forty-five.

These explosions have come on the heels of other recent attacks targeting civilians. On November 2, at least nineteen people were killed and at least twenty-two wounded by gunmen opening fire at Kabul University. On October 24, at least two dozen students died, and more than 100 were wounded in an attack on a tutoring center.

“The situation in our country is very bad and scary,” one young Afghan friend wrote to me. “We are all worried.” I imagine that’s an understatement.

A new report released by Save the Children, regarding violations against children in war zones, says Afghanistan accounts for the most killing and maiming violations, with 874 children killed and 2,275 children maimed in 2019.

Since the United Nations started collecting this data in 2005, more than 26,000 Afghan children have died.

Under President Donald Trump, the United States signed a “peace” deal with the Taliban in February 2020. It pertains to troop withdrawal and a Taliban pledge to cut ties with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The agreement certainly hasn’t contributed toward a more peaceful life for Afghans, and a U.N. report indicates the Taliban has continued its ties with insurgent groups.

Now, Afghans face constant battles between insurgent groups, U.S. forces, Afghan government forces, NATO forces, various powerful Afghan warlords, and paramilitaries organized by ruthless mafias which control much of the drug industry and other profitable enterprises.

Under President Biden, the United States would likely abide by Trump’s recent troop withdrawals, maintaining a troop presence of about 2,000. But Biden has indicated a preference for intensified Special Operations, surveillance and drone attacks. These strategies could cause the Taliban to nullify their agreement, prolonging the war through yet another presidency.

Mujib Mashal, a correspondent for The New York Times, was born in Kabul. When he was interviewed recently by one of his colleagues, he recalled being a little boy in the early 1990s, living through a civil war in Kabul, when rockets constantly bombarded his neighborhood.

Taliban groups were fighting various mujahideen. Mujib’s father cultivated a vegetable garden outside their home. One day, a rocket hit the garden, cutting an apple tree in half and burrowing deep into the ground.

But it didn’t explode.

Mujib remembers how his father watered the area where the rocket hit, for years, hoping the bomb would eventually rust and never explode. Now he worries that Afghanistan is headed toward an explosion of violence.

“And the fear is that in that space of war, things only get more extreme,” he told the Times. “The violence only gets more extreme. The brutality gets more extreme. That if this slips into another generational conflict, what we’ve seen over the past forty years in terms of the brutality will probably pale in comparison to what will come.”

I recently watched a video of a talk given in June of this year by Dr. Zaher Wahab, an Afghan professor in Portland, Oregon, who laments the intensifying havoc and violence war is causing in Afghanistan. He and his wife lived there for six years, until about a year ago, when they concluded that the city was unlivable.

Dr. Wahab believes there is no military solution to Afghanistan’s woes and calls for the United States to demilitarize as soon as possible. But he also offers ways forward.

He urges forming a multinational trust fund to justly assist with reconstruction in Afghanistan, including efforts to clear mines and clean up unexploded ordnance. Billions of dollars would be needed, commensurate to the sums spent on funding the war. He believes the United Nations should form a peacekeeping presence in Afghanistan relying on non-NATO countries.

The publication of the “Afghanistan papers” late last year highlighted the failure of the United States to accomplish any of its stated missions in Afghanistan. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, expressedhis astonishment over the “hubris and mendacity” he had witnessed on the part of  U.S. military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan.

Despite its failures, the United States continues to bomb Afghan civilian areas. In 2019, the U.S. dropped 7,423 bombs and other munitions on Afghanistan.

For Afghan civilians, ongoing war means continued  bereavement, displacement, and despair. Bereft of income or protection, many Afghan householders join militias, pledging their support and possibly their willingness to fight or even die. Hence the rise of the Afghan Local Police, numerous militias fighting for various warlords, the Afghan governments’ fighting forces, including “ghost soldiers” who appear in name only, CIA-trained paramilitaries, and military contractors working for NATO contingents.

Afghanistan is a cauldron waiting to explode.

U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, retired, notes that in the 2020 election, neither presidential candidate questioned status quo norms about U.S. foreign policy being based on threat, force, and killing. Sjursen assures that pressure to change must, necessarily, flow from the grass roots.

The United States has landed in Afghanistan like a rocket in a garden. It refuses to rust, it poisons the Earth, and even U.S. voters can’t budge it. Normal life can’t continue with us there.

Meanwhile, an inevitably arriving Taliban-led government—one already in control of most of the country—is growing more fanatic and deadly.

Many U.S. voters, and too many Afghans, weren’t yet born when the current war was begun by the United States in 2001. Much of the U.S. public regards the Afghan people with deadly indifference.

Year after year, President after President, Americans continue to pretend the despair and futility we’ve caused in Afghanistan isn’t our fault. We don’t hold ourselves accountable.

But the forever wars, illegal and immoral, bankrupt our economy and our society as well. The military contractors become a sort of mafia. They are like a bomb in our garden, liable to explode.

And, unlike our Afghan counterparts, it’s not a bomb we can complain about. After all, we put it there.

Today, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, should be a day for quiet introspection. I recall a summer morning following the U.S. 2003 “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq when the segment of the Chicago River flowing past the headquarters of the world’s second largest defense contractor, Boeing, turned the rich, red color of blood. At the water’s edge, Chicago activists, long accustomed to the river being dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day turned the river red to symbolize the bloodshed caused by Boeing products. On the bridge outside of Boeing’s entrance, activists held placards urging Boeing to stop making weapons.

This summer, orders for Boeing’s commercial jets have cratered during the pandemic, but the company’s revenue from weapon-making contracts remains steady. David Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, recently expressed confidence the U.S. government will support defense industries no matter who occupies the Oval Office. Both presidential candidates appear “globally oriented,” he said, “and interested in the defense of our country.”

Investors should ask how Boeing’s contract to deliver 1,000 SLAM- ER weapons (Standoff Land Attack Missiles-Expanded Response) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “defends” the United States.

Here are excerpts from Jeffrey Stern’s account of a missile’s impact on the town of Arhab in a remote area of Yemen. In this case, the missile was manufactured by Raytheon:

Now, as Fahd walked into the hut, a weapon about the length of a compact car was wobbling gracelessly down through the air toward him, losing altitude and unspooling an arming wire that connected it to the jet until, once it had extended a few feet, the wire ran out and ripped from the bomb.

Then it was as if the weapon woke up. A thermal battery was activated. Three fins on the rear extended all the way and locked in place. The bomb stabilized in the air. A guidance-control unit on the nose locked onto a laser reflection — invisible to the naked eye but meaningful to the bomb — sparkling on the rocks Fahd walked over.

At the well,at the moment of impact, a series of events happened almost instantaneously. The nose of the weapon hit rock, tripping a fuse in its tail section that detonated the equivalent of 200 pounds of TNT. When a bomb like this explodes, the shell fractures into several thousand pieces, becoming a jigsaw puzzle of steel shards flying through the air at up to eight times the speed of sound. Steel moving that fast doesn’t just kill people; it rearranges them. It removes appendages from torsos; it disassembles bodies and redistributes their parts.

Fahd had just stepped into the stone shelter and registered only a sudden brightness. He heard nothing. He was picked up, pierced with shrapnel, spun around and then slammed into the back wall, both of his arms shattering — the explosion so forceful that it excised seconds from his memory. Metal had bit into leg, trunk, jaw, eye; one piece entered his back and exited his chest, leaving a hole that air and liquid began to fill, collapsing his lungs. By the time he woke up, crumpled against stone, he was suffocating. Somehow he had survived, but he was killing himself with every breath, and he was bleeding badly. But he wasn’t even aware of any of these things, because his brain had been taken over by pain that seemed to come from another world.

In 2019, the UN Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen observed “the continued supply of weapons to parties involved in Yemen perpetuates the conflict and the suffering of the population.”

These experts say “the conduct of hostilities by the parties to the conflict, including by airstrikes and shelling, may amount to serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

A year and a half ago, were it not for a presidential veto, both houses of the U.S. Congress would have enacted a law banning weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

Another end-user of Boeing’s weapons is the Israeli Defense Force.

The company has provided Israel with AH-64 Apache helicopters, F-15 fighter jets, Hellfire missiles (produced with Lockheed Martin), MK-84 2000-lb bombs, MK-82 500-lb bombs, and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) kits that turn bombs into “smart” GPS-equipped guided bombs. Boeing’s Harpoon sea-to-sea missile system is installed on the upgraded 4.5 Sa’ar missile ships of the Israeli Navy.

Apache helicopters, Hellfire and Harpoon missiles, JDAM guiding systems, and Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) munitions have been used repeatedly in Israeli attacks on densely populated civilian areas, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The human rights community, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and United Nations commissions, ruled these attacks to be human rights violations and at times war crimes.

I lived with a family, in Gaza, during the final days of the 2009 “Operation Cast Lead” bombing. Abu Yusuf, Umm Yusuf, and their two small children, Yusuf and Shahid, welcomed Audrey Stewart and me to stay with them. Once every 11 minutes from 11 p.m. – 1:00 a.m. and again from 3:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m., we heard an ear-splitting blast. Normally, I wouldn’t have known the difference between the sound of a Hellfire Missile exploding and that of a 500 lb. bomb dropped from an F-15, but soon I could tell the difference. Little Yusuf and Shahid taught us to distinguish one gut-wrenching sound from the other. They had been cringing under the bombs for 18 days and nights.

I don’t see how the sale of weapons to governments which use them against civilian populations, against people like Fahad, in Arhab or Abu Yusuf and his family in Gaza, defends people in the U.S.

Boeing’s vast resources for scientific know-how, skillful engineering, and creative innovation could, however, help defend the U.S. against the greatest threat we now face, environmental climate catastrophe. Writing for The New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben predicts “a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through right now.” The main question, he says, is whether human beings can hold the alarming rise in temperature “to a point where we can at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization.”

“A rise of one degree doesn’t sound like an extraordinary change,” McKibben writes, “but it is: each second, the carbon and methane we’ve emitted trap heat equivalent to the explosion of three Hiroshima-sized bombs.”

Boeing’s engineers, scientists, designers and marketers could help turn the tide of human actions destroying our earth. Their expertise could truly “defend” people.

There’s a lesson to be learned from the river flowing outside of Boeing’s headquarters. It actually flows backwards. Long ago, brilliant engineers designed a way for the river to reverse its course. In doing so, they saved Chicago from sewage contamination of its drinking water supply – Lake Michigan. This action was hailed as one of the great engineering wonders of the world.

The City’s sewers discharged human and industrial wastes directly to its rivers, which in turn flowed into the lake. A particularly heavy rainstorm in 1885 caused sewage to be flushed into the lake beyond the clean water intakes. The resulting typhoid, cholera, and dysentery epidemics killed an estimated 12 percent of Chicago’s 750,000 residents, and raised a public outcry to find a permanent solution to the city’s water supply and sewage disposal crisis.”

The Sanitary and Ship Canal was constructed at an estimated cost of over $70,000,000. After its completion, in 1900, waterborne disease rates quickly and dramatically improved, and its water supply system was soon regarded as being one of the safest in the world. With its water source made safe and dependable by the canals, Chicago and the region grew and prospered rapidly.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to dye the Chicago River, red or green. We need to protect the river and all wildlife dependent on it. But, we must continually confront Boeing and other weapon manufacturers, and insist they not destroy lives, homes and infrastructures in other lands. We must urge Boeing, like the river, to reverse course and participate, with dignity and humility, in the pursuit of human survival.

Some of the 40 blue backpacks worn in a protest in New York city against the war in Yemen. Each backpack was accompanied by a sign with the name and age of a child killed on a school bus in Dahyan, northern Yemen, on August 9, 2018, in a Saudi/UAE airstrike. Photo: CODEPINK.

“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”

— Bertolt Brecht

In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the Children reported 85,000 children under age five had already died from starvation since the war escalated in 2015. By the end of 2020, it is expected that 23,500 children with severe acute malnutrition will be at immediate risk of death.

Cataclysmic conditions afflict Yemen as people try to cope with rampant diseases, the spread of COVID-19, flooding, literal swarms of locusts, rising displacement, destroyed infrastructure and a collapsed economy. Yet war rages, bombs continue to fall, and desperation fuels more crimes.

The highest-paying jobs available to many Yemeni men and boys require a willingness to kill and maim one another, by joining militias or armed groups which seemingly never run out of weapons. Nor does the Saudi-Led Coalition which kills and maims civilians; instead, it deters relief shipments and destroys crucial infrastructure with weapons it imports from Western countries.

The aerial attacks displace traumatized survivors into swelling, often lethal refugee camps. Amid the wreckage of factories, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation facilities, schools and hospitals, Yemenis search in vain for employment and, increasingly, for food and water. The Saudi-Led-Coalition’s blockade, also enabled by Western training and weapons, makes it impossible for Yemenis to restore a functioning economy.

Even foreign aid can become punitive. In March, 2020, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) decided to suspend most aid for Yemenis living in areas controlled by the Houthis.

Scott Paul, who leads Oxfam America’s humanitarian policy advocacy, strongly criticized this callous decision to compound the misery imposed on vulnerable people in Yemen. “In future years,” he wrote, “scholars will study USAID’s suspension as a paradigmatic example of a donor’s exploitation and misuse of humanitarian principles.”

As the evil-doing in Yemen comes “like falling rain,” so do the cries of “Stop!” from millions of people all over the world. Here’s some of what’s been happening:

+ U.S. legislators in both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars in weapons and maintenance to Saudi Arabia and its allies. But President Trump vetoed the bill in 2019.

+ Canada’s legislators declared a moratorium on weapon sales to the Saudis. But the Canadian government has resumed selling weapons to the Saudis, claiming the moratorium only pertained to the creation of new contracts, not existing ones.

+ The United Kingdom suspended military sales to Saudi Arabia because of human rights violations, but the UK’s international trade secretary nevertheless resumed weapon sales saying the 516 charges of Saudi human rights violations are all isolated incidents and don’t present a pattern of abuse.

+ French NGOs and human rights advocates urged their government to scale back on weapon sales to the Saudi-Led coalition, but reports on 2019 weapon sales revealed the French government sold 1.4 billion Euros worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

+ British campaigners opposing weapon transfers to the Saudi-Led Coalition have exposed how the British Navy gave the Saudi Navy training in tactics essential to the devastating Yemen blockade.

+ In Canada, Spain, France and Italy, laborers opposed to the ongoing war refused to load weapons onto ships sailing to Saudi Arabia. Rights groups track the passage of trains and ships carrying these weapons.

On top of all this, reports produced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Commission of the Red Cross repeatedly expose the Saudi-Led Coalition’s human rights violations.

Yet this international outcry clamoring for an end to the war is still being drowned out by the voices of military contractors with well-paid lobbyists plying powerful elites in Western governments. Their concern is simply for the profits to be reaped and the competitive sales to be scored.

In 2019 Lockheed Martin’s total sales reached nearly 60 billion dollars, the best year on record for the world’s largest “defense” contractor. Before stepping down as CEO, Marillyn Hewson predicted demand from the Pentagon and U.S. allies would generate an uptake between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion in net earnings for the company in 2020 sales.

Hewson’s words, spoken calmly, drown out the cries of Yemeni children whose bodies were torn apart by just one of Lockheed Martin’s bombs.

In August of 2018, bombs manufactured by Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin fell on Yemen like summer rain. On August 9, 2018, a missile blasted a school bus in Yemen, killing forty children and injuring many others.

Photos showed badly injured children still carrying UNICEF blue backpacks, given to them that morning as gifts. Other photos showed surviving children helping prepare graves for their schoolmates. One photo showed a piece of the bomb protruding from the wreckage with the number MK82 clearly stamped on it. That number on the shrapnel helped identify Lockheed Martin as the manufacturer.

The psychological damage being inflicted on these children is incalculable. “My son is really hurt from the inside,” said a parent whose child was severely wounded by the bombing. “We try to talk to him to feel better and we can’t stop ourselves from crying.”

The cries against war in Yemen also fall like rain and whatever thunder accompanies the rain is distant, summer thunder. Yet, if we cooperate with war making elites, the most horrible storms will be unleashed. We must learn–and quickly–to make a torrent of our mingled cries and, as the prophet Amos demanded, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

This article appeared on The Progressive website.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”  When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

— Bertolt Brecht, “When evil-doing comes like falling rain” [Wenn die Untat kommt, wie der Regen fällt] (1935), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 247

 In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the Children reported 85,000 children under age five had already died from starvation since the war escalated in 2015. By the end of 2020, it is expected that 23,500 children with severe acute malnutrition will be at immediate risk of death.

Cataclysmic conditions afflict Yemen as people try to cope with rampant diseases, the spread of COVID-19, flooding, literal swarms of locusts, rising displacement, destroyed infrastructure and a collapsed economy. Yet war rages, bombs continue to fall, and desperation fuels more crimes.

The highest-paying jobs available to many Yemeni men and boys require a willingness to kill and maim one another, by joining militias or armed groups which seemingly never run out of weapons. Nor does the Saudi-Led Coalition  which kills and maims civilians; instead, it deters relief shipments and destroys crucial infrastructure with weapons it imports from Western countries.

The aerial attacks displace traumatized survivors into swelling, often lethal, refugee camps. Amid the wreckage of factories, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation facilities, schools and hospitals, Yemenis search in vain for employment and, increasingly, for food and water. The Saudi-Led-Coalition’s blockade, also enabled by Western training and weapons, makes it impossible for Yemenis to restore a functioning economy.

Even foreign aid can become punitive. In March, 2020, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) decided to suspend most aid for Yemenis living in areas controlled by the Houthis.

Scott Paul, who leads Oxfam America’s humanitarian policy advocacy, strongly criticized this callous decision to compound the misery imposed on vulnerable people in Yemen. “In future years,” he wrote, “scholars will study USAID’s suspension as a paradigmatic example of a donor’s exploitation and misuse of humanitarian principles.”

As the evil-doing in Yemen comes “like falling rain,” so do the cries of “Stop!” from millions of people all over the world. Here’s some of what’s been happening:

• U.S. legislators in both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars in weapons and maintenance to Saudi Arabia and its allies. But President Trump vetoed the bill in 2019.
• Canada’s legislators declared a moratorium on weapon sales to the Saudis. But the Canadian government has resumed selling weapons to the Saudis, claiming the moratorium only pertained to the creation of new contracts, not existing ones.
• The United Kingdom suspended military sales to Saudi Arabia because of human rights violations, but the UK’s international trade secretary nevertheless resumed weapon sales saying the 516 charges of Saudi human rights violations are all isolated incidents and don’t present a pattern of abuse.
• French NGOs and human rights advocates urged their government to scale back on weapon sales to the Saudi-Led coalition, but reports on 2019 weapon sales revealed the French government sold 1.4 billion Euros worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
• British campaigners opposing weapon transfers to the Saudi-Led Coalition have exposed how the British Navy gave the Saudi Navy training in tactics essential to the devastating Yemen blockade.
• In Canada, Spain, France and Italy, laborers opposed to the ongoing war refused to load weapons onto ships sailing to Saudi Arabia. Rights groups track the passage of trains and ships carrying these weapons.

On top of all this, reports produced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Commission of the Red Cross repeatedly expose the Saudi-Led Coalition’s human rights violations.

Yet this international outcry clamoring for an end to the war is still being drowned out by the voices of military contractors with well-paid lobbyists plying powerful elites in Western governments. Their concern is simply for the profits to be reaped and the competitive sales to be scored.

In 2019 Lockheed Martin’s total sales reached nearly 60 billion dollars, the best year on record for the world’s largest “defense” contractor. Before stepping down as CEO, Marillyn Hewson predicted demand from the Pentagon and U.S. allies would generate an uptake between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion in net earnings for the company in 2020 sales.

Hewson’s words, spoken calmly, drown out the cries of Yemeni children whose bodies were torn apart by just one of Lockheed Martin’s bombs.

In August of 2018, bombs manufactured by Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin fell on Yemen like summer rain. On August 9, 2018, a missile blasted a school bus in Yemen, killing forty children and injuring many others.

Photos showed badly injured children still carrying UNICEF blue backpacks, given to them that morning as gifts. Other photos showed surviving children helping prepare graves for their schoolmates. One  photo showed a piece of the bomb protruding from the wreckage with the number MK82 clearly stamped on it. That number on the shrapnel helped identify Lockheed Martin as the manufacturer.

The psychological damage being inflicted on these children is incalculable. “My son is really hurt from the inside,” said a parent whose child was severely wounded by the bombing. “We try to talk to him to feel better and we can’t stop ourselves from crying.”

The cries against war in Yemen also fall like rain and whatever thunder accompanies the rain is distant, summer thunder. Yet, if we cooperate with war-making elites, the most horrible storms will be unleashed. We must learn — and quickly — to make a torrent of our mingled cries and, as the prophet Amos demanded, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Some of the 40 blue backpacks worn in a protest in New York city against the war in Yemen. Each backpack was accompanied by a sign with the name and age of a child killed on a school bus in Dahyan, northern Yemen, on August 9, 2018, in a Saudi/UAE airstrike. (Photo: CODEPINK)

• A version of this article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine.

The time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the past.

—Lisa Savage, U.S. Senate candidate in Maine

On Thursday, June 25^th, President Trump’s re-election efforts took him to the “battleground” state of Wisconsin, where he toured the Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard. He railed against the Democrats as a scarier enemy than Russia or China. He also celebrated Wisconsin’s win over domestic enemies like the state of Maine in securing a key shipbuilding project. “The first-in-class FFG(X) [frigate] will not just be a win for Wisconsin workers; it will also be a major victory for our Navy,” Trump said.  “… The stunning ships will deliver the overwhelming force, lethality, and power we need to engage America’s enemies anywhere and at any time.”  On many military minds, it seems, was China.

“If you just look at the geography of Indo-Pacom, these ships can go a lot of places that destroyers can’t go,” said Northeast Wisconsin’s Representative Mike Gallagher, a hawkish Republican outspokenly eager for future wars in the ‘Indo-Pacific Command’: in particular, wars against China. “… not just frigates, but unmanned ships… it will align nicely with a lot of what the Marine Corps Commandant is talking about in terms of capitalizing on the overdue death of the [Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty, and fielding intermediate range fires.”

The Commandant in question, Gen. David Berger, has explained: “The thing that has driven us to where we are right now is the paradigm shift by China moving to sea…” Berger wants “mobile and fast” ships to keep American marines on temporary bases as near as possible to China, since “the farther you back away from China, they will move toward you.”

Fincantieri, an Italian company, acquired the Marinette shipyard in 2009, and, just last month, received a lucrative US Navy contract to build between one and ten frigates, representing a tactical shift from larger destroyers. Outfitted by Lockheed Martin with 32 vertical launch tubes and a “state of the art SPY-6 radar system,” with power capacity to accommodate arriving “electronic warfare systems,” the frigate will be capable of simultaneously attacking submarines, land targets and surface ships. If all ten ships are built in the shipyard, the contract will be worth $5.5 billion dollars. Rep. Gallagher and President Trump both support a Navy leadership goal of expanding the U.S. fleet well beyond its current speculative cap of 355 warships, adding multiple unmanned vessels.

Marinette had been vying with several other shipyards, including Bath Iron Works in Maine, for the multi-billion-dollar contract. On March 2, a bipartisan coalition of 54 WI legislators had signed a letter urging President Trump to direct the U.S. Navy frigate construction contract to the Marinette shipyard. “We are hopeful that the US Navy will decide to bring additional ship construction to the state of Wisconsin,” the legislators wrote in their concluding paragraph, calling the opportunity vital not just for a growing Wisconsin shipyard, “but for the communities of great Americans who will benefit for years to come from valuable and meaningful work on behalf of our country.”

The deal could add 1,000 jobs in the area and the shipbuilder plans to invest $200 million to expand the Marinette facility because of the contract. So this was a victory lap for the shipyard, but also for Donald Trump who can deliver these jobs to a “battleground” state crucial for his hopes in this coming winter’s election. Would this rally have occurred had the contract gone to Maine’s Bath Iron Works?  Lisa Savage is campaigning as an Independent Green to represent Maine as a  U.S. Senator. Asked to comment on whether Maine “lost” when the contract went to Wisconsin, she offered this statement:

Bath Iron Works in Maine is currently engaged in union busting contract negotiations to promote its ongoing policy of bringing in contract labor that is not unionized. This follows years of no-raise contracts with its largest union, S6, the result of BIW demanding that workers sacrifice so that its owner can pay its CEO tens of millions of dollars a year and buy back its own stock. General Dynamics can afford to pay workers fairly, given the $45 million tax break the Maine Legislature granted the massive military manufacturer, and the $900 million in cash on hand the company reported in its last SEC filing.

The time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the past. The global pandemic emphasizes for us all the interconnectivity of our global society and the folly, wastefulness, and moral failure of war in all forms. We must transform facilities like BIW and Marinette into hubs of manufacturing for solutions to the climate crisis, including public transportation, resources for the creation of renewable energy, and disaster-response vessels.

Building clean energy systems would generate up to 50% more jobs than making arms systems according to research by leading economists. The two biggest security threats to the United States are currently the climate crisis and COVID-19. The Pentagon’s contractors have long contributed to the climate crisis, and the time for conversion is now.

Before the pandemic hit, and before this U.S. Navy contract was awarded to Marinette, my fellow activists at Voices for Creative Nonviolence were planning a protest walk to the Marinette shipyard. As Trump noted in his speech at Marinette, they are currently building four Littoral Combat Ships for sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Defense industry analysts noted, in late 2019, with the U.S. Navy no longer interested in purchasing Littoral Combat Ships from the yard, the Marinette shipyard had been “saved by the Saudis” and by Lockheed Martin, which had helped arrange the contract.

The Saudi military has been using U.S.-supplied Littoral (near-coast) Combat Ships to blockade the coastal ports of Yemen, which is undergoing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis due to a famine exacerbated by the Saudi-led blockade and an invasion involving relentless aerial bombardment. Actual cholera epidemics, reminiscent of centuries past, were another result of the war’s creation of lethal delays and shortages for Yemeni people in desperate need of fuel, food, medicine and clean water. Yemen’s humanitarian situation, worsened by the spread of COVID-19, is now so desperate that the United Nations humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, warned Yemen will “fall off the cliff” without massive financial support. President Trump took full credit for the Saudi contract at today’s rally.

The world that our global empire is swiftly creating, through our devastating oil wars in the Middle East and our arriving cold wars with Russia and China, is a world without winners. Maine could find ample reason to celebrate losing its battle for this contract if it considered the precious gained opportunity of which Savage eloquently reminds us: of conversion, with a net gain in jobs, to industries that prepare us against the real threats we face: devastating climate change, a global pandemic, and the corrosive shame of endless war. We must resist signing contracts with weapon makers profiting from endless immiseration of the Middle East and needless superpower rivalries inviting full nuclear war. Such contracts, inked in blood, doom every corner of our world to perish as a battleground state.

Now, however, due to the coronavirus, the vigil for peace is radically altered. Last week, in recognition of the city’s coming shelter in place program, participants were asked to hold individual vigils at their respective homes on the subsequent Saturday mornings. Normally, during the public vigils, one or more participants would provide updates on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the ongoing war, and U.S. complicity. As COVID-19 threatens to engulf war-torn Yemen, it is even more critical to raise awareness of how the war debilitates the country.

If the vigil for peace were to gather in Union Square this Saturday, activists most certainly would draw attention to how Turkish officials  indicted 20 Saudi nationals for the murder of the dissident writer, Jamal Khashoggi. Turkey’s investigation of the murder and dismemberment of Mr. Khashoggi indicts 18 people for committing the murder and names two officials for incitement to murder. One of them, General Ahmad Al-Asiri, a close associate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was deputy chief of intelligence when Mr. Khashoggi was murdered.

Numerous news reports over the past five years establish a pattern of Mr. Al-Asiri responding to inquiries about Saudi-led coalition military attacks against Yemen civilians with misleading statements, outright denials and attempted cover-ups.

For example, On August 30th, 2015, according to Human Rights Watch, a Saudi coalition led airstrike attacked the Al-Sham Water Bottling Factory in the outskirts of Abs, in northern Yemen. The strike destroyed the factory and killed 14 workers, including three boys, and wounded 11 more.

Later on August 30, after the airstrike, Gen. Al-Asiri told Reuters that the plant was not a bottling factory, but rather a place where Houthis made explosive devices. However, all of the individuals Human Rights Watch interviewed concurred:

…that plant was being used to bottle water and was not used for any military purposes… A group of international journalists traveled to the site of the blast two days after it was hit and reported that they could not find evidence of any military targets in the area. They said that they carefully examined the site, and took photos and videos of piles of scorched plastic bottles melted together from the heat of the explosion. They could not find any evidence that the factory was being used for military purposes.

Meanwhile, Yemenis were desperately trying to contend with rising cases of cholera caused by shortages of clean water.

In October, 2015, when eyewitnesses declared a hospital in northern Yemen run by Doctors Without Borders was destroyed by Saudi-led coalition warplanes, Gen. Al-Asiri told Reuters coalition jets had been in action over Saada governorate but had not hit the hospital.

On August 15, 2016,  a Saudi-led bombing campaign again targeted a hospital in northern Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders. 19 people were killed.

The Abs hospital was bombed two days after Saudi airstrikes attacked a school in northern Yemen, killing ten students and wounding dozens more.

Yet Saudi officials continued to insist they struck military targets only. Commenting on the August 13 school attack, Gen. Al-Asiri said the dead children were evidence the Houthis were recruiting children as guards and fighters.

“We would have hoped,” General Al-Asiri said, that Doctors Without Borders “would take measures to stop the recruitment of children to fight in wars instead of crying over them in the media.”

In one of the deadliest attacks of the war, on October 8, 2016, the Saudi-led military coalition’s fighter jets repeatedly bombed a hall filled with mourners during a funeral for an official in the capital city of Sana. At least 140 people were killed and 550 more were wounded.

General Al-Asiri, still a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, suggested there were other causes for the blast and later reported the coalition had not carried out any strikes near the hall. But outraged U.N. officials, backed up by videos on social media, insisted that airstrikes had massacred the mourners.

The United States has steadily sided with Saudi Arabia, including supplying it with weapons, training its armed forces and covering for it in the U.N. Security Council. But “Defense One,” a U.S. news agency intending to provide news and analysis for national security leaders and stakeholders, recently issued a stinging rebuke to the Kingdom’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. They denounced the “humanitarian abomination ushered by Riyadh’s war in Yemen,” and called his leadership “as destabilizing to the Middle East as its Iranian rival.” Defense One urged Washington to discontinue enabling “Riyadh’s most reckless behavior.”

Turkey’s indictment of 20 Saudi nationals for murder and their insistence that Mr. Al-Asiri bears responsibility may help move the court of public opinion to resist all support for the Kingdom’s ongoing war in Yemen.

Particularly now, with intense focus on U.S. health care, it’s timely to recognize that in the past five years U.S. supported Gulf Coalition airstrikes bombed Yemen’s health care facilities 83 times. As parents here care for children during school closures, they should be reminded that since December 13, 2018, eight Yemeni children have been killed or injured every single day. Most of the children killed were playing outdoors with their friends or were on their way to or from school. According to the Yemen Data Project, more than 18,400 civilians have been killed or injured by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies since the initial  bombing campaign in 2015.

U.S. national security leaders and stakeholders in war, as they shelter in place, have an extraordinary opportunity to set a new norm and link with the vigil for Peace in Yemen, virtually. And, some may even join Yale students on April 9, from sunrise to sunset, in their National Fast for Peace in Yemen. They invite us to pledge support for Doctors Without Borders and other relief groups in Yemen.

Activists practice “physical distancing” at a Saturday morning vigil for Peace in Yemen, Union Square, NYC (Photo Credit: Bill Ofenloch)

This article was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2020 at 7:02am and is filed under Activism, Children/Youth, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Lies, Media, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United States, US Military, Yemen.

U.S. sanctions against Iran, cruelly strengthened in March of 2018, continue a collective punishment of extremely vulnerable people. Presently, the U.S. “maximum pressure” policy severely undermines Iranian efforts to cope with the ravages of COVID-19, causing hardship and tragedy while contributing to the global spread of the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif urged member states of the UN to end the United States’ unconscionable and lethal economic warfare.

Addressing UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Zarif detailed how U.S. economic sanctions prevent Iranians from importing necessary medicine and medical equipment.

For over two years, while the U.S. bullied other countries to refrain from purchasing Iranian oil, Iranians have coped with crippling economic decline.

The devastated economy and worsening coronavirus outbreak now drive migrants and refugees, who number in the millions, back to Afghanistan at dramatically increased rates.

In the past two weeks alone, more than 50,000 Afghans returned from Iran, increasing the likelihood that cases of coronavirus will surge in Afghanistan. Decades of war, including U.S. invasion and occupation, have decimated Afghanistan’s health care and food distribution systems.

Jawad Zarif asks the UN to prevent the use of hunger and disease as a weapon of war. His letter demonstrates the  wreckage caused by many decades of United States imperialism and suggests revolutionary steps toward dismantling the United States war machine.

During the United States’ 1991 “Desert Storm” war against Iraq, I was part of the Gulf Peace Team, – at first, living at in a “peace camp” set up near the Iraq-Saudi border and later, following our removal by Iraqi troops, in a Baghdad hotel which formerly housed many journalists. Finding an abandoned typewriter, we melted a candle onto its rim, (the U.S. had destroyed Iraq’s electrical stations, and most of the hotel rooms were pitch black). We compensated for an absent typewriter ribbon by placing a sheet of red carbon paper over our stationery. When Iraqi authorities realized we managed to type our document, they asked if we would type their letter to the Secretary General of the UN. (Iraq was so beleaguered even cabinet level officials lacked typewriter ribbons.) The letter to Javier Perez de Cuellar implored the UN to prevent the U.S. from bombing a road between Iraq and Jordan, the only way out for refugees and the only way in for humanitarian relief. Devastated by bombing and already bereft of supplies, Iraq was, in 1991, only one year into a deadly sanctions regime that lasted for thirteen years before the U.S. began its full-scale invasion and occupation in 2003. Now, in 2020, Iraqis still suffering from impoverishment, displacement and war earnestly want the U.S. to practice self-distancing and leave their country.

Are we now living in a watershed time? An unstoppable, deadly virus ignores any borders the U.S. tries to reinforce or redraw. The United States military-industrial complex, with its massive arsenals and cruel capacity for siege, isn’t relevant to “security” needs. Why should the U.S., at this crucial juncture, approach other countries with threat and force and presume a right to preserve global inequities? Such arrogance doesn’t even ensure security for the United States military. If the U.S. further isolates and batters Iran, conditions will worsen in Afghanistan and United States troops stationed there will ultimately be at risk. The simple observation, “We are all part of one another,” becomes acutely evident.

It’s helpful to think of guidance from past leaders who faced wars and pandemics. The Spanish flu pandemic in 1918-19, coupled with the atrocities of World War I,  killed 50 million worldwide, 675,000 in the U.S. Thousands of female nurses were on the “front lines,” delivering health care. Among them were black nurses who not only risked their lives to practice the works of mercy but also fought discrimination and racism in their determination to serve. These brave women arduously paved a way for the first 18 black nurses to serve in the Army Nurse Corps and they provided “a small turning point in the continuing movement for health equity.”

In the spring of 1919, Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton witnessed the effects of sanctions against Germany imposed by Allied forces after World War I. They observed “critical shortages of food, soap and medical supplies” and wrote indignantly about how children were being punished with starvation for “the sins of statesmen.”

Starvation continued even after the blockade was finally lifted that summer with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Hamilton and Addams reported how the flu epidemic, exacerbated in its spread by starvation and post-war devastation, in turn disrupted the food supply. The two women argued a policy of sensible food distribution was necessary for both  humanitarian and strategic reasons. “What was to be gained by starving more children?” bewildered German parents asked them.

Jonathan Whitall directs Humanitarian Analysis for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors without Borders. His most recent analysis poses agonizing questions:

How are you supposed to wash your hands regularly if you have no running water or soap? How are you supposed to implement ‘social distancing’ if you live in a slum or a refugee or containment camp? How are you supposed to stay at home if your work pays by the hour and requires you to show up? How are you supposed to stop crossing borders if you are fleeing from war? How are you supposed to get tested for #COVID19 if the health system is privatized and you can’t afford it? How are those with pre-existing health conditions supposed to take extra precautions when they already can’t even access the treatment they need?

I expect many people worldwide, during the spread of COVID – 19,  are thinking hard about the glaring, deadly inequalities in our societies, wonder how best to extend proverbial hands of friendship to people in need while urged to accept isolation and social distancing. One way to help others survive is to insist the United States lift sanctions against Iran and instead support acts of practical care. Jointly confront the coronavirus while constructing a humane future for the world without wasting  time or resources on the continuation of brutal wars.

This article was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2020 at 7:42pm and is filed under COVID-19 (coronavirus), Food/Nutrition, Hunger, Iran, Iraq, Media, Sanctions, United Nations, United States, War.

The 2003 “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq had finally stopped. From the balcony of my room in Baghdad’s Al Fanar Hotel, I watched U.S. Marines moving between their jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees. They had occupied the street immediately in front of the small, family-owned hotel where our Iraq Peace Team had been living for the past six months. Looking upward, a U.S. Marine could see enlarged vinyl photos of beautiful Iraqi children strung across balconies of our fifth-floor rooms. We silently stood on those balconies when the U.S. Marines arrived in Baghdad, holding signs that said “War = Terror” and “Courage for Peace, Not for War.” When she first saw the Marine’s faces, Cynthia Banas commented on how young and tired they seemed. Wearing her “War Is Not the Answer” T-shirt, she headed down the stairs to offer them bottled water.

From my balcony, I saw Cathy Breen, also a member of the Iraq Peace Team, kneeling on a large canvas artwork entrusted to us by friends from South Korea. It depicts people suffering from war. Above the people, like a sinister cloud, is a massive heap of weapons. We unrolled it the day the Marines arrived and began to “occupy” this space. Marines carefully avoided driving vehicles over it. Sometimes they would converse with us. Below, Cathy read from a small booklet of daily Scripture passages. A U.S. Marine approached her, knelt down, and apparently asked to pray with her. He placed his hands in hers.

April Hurley, of our team, is a doctor. She was greatly needed in the emergency room of a nearby hospital during the bombing. Drivers would only take her there if she was accompanied by someone they had known for a long time, and so I generally accompanied her. I’d often sit on a bench outside the emergency room while traumatized civilians rushed in with wounded and maimed survivors of the terrifying U.S. aerial bombings. When possible, Cathy Breen and I would take notes at the bedsides of patients, including children, whose bodies had been ripped apart by U.S. bombs.

The ER scenes were gruesome, bloody and utterly tragic. Yet no less unbearable and incomprehensible were the eerily quiet wards we had visited during trips to Iraq from 1996 to 2003, when Voices in the Wilderness had organized 70 delegations to defy the economic sanctions by bringing medicines and medical relief supplies to hospitals in Iraq. Across the country, Iraqi doctors told us the economic war was far worse than even the 1991 Desert Storm bombing.

In pediatrics wards, we saw infants and toddlers whose bodies were wasted from gastrointestinal diseases, cancers, respiratory infections and starvation. Limp, miserable, sometimes gasping for breath, they lay in the arms of their sorrowful mothers, and seemingly no one could stop the U.S. from punishing them to death. “Why?” mothers murmured. Sanctions forbade Iraq to sell its oil. Without oil revenues, how could they purchase desperately needed goods? Iraq’s infrastructure continued to crumble; hospitals became surreal symbols of cruelty where doctors and nurses, bereft of medicines and supplies, couldn’t heal their patients or ease their agonies.

In 1995, UN officials estimated that economic sanctions had directly contributed to the deaths of at least a half-million Iraqi children, under age 5.

Kathy Kelly with children in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 2016 (Provided photo)

The economic war continued for nearly 13 harsh and horrible years.

Shortly after the Marines arrived outside of our hotel, we began hearing ominous reports of potential humanitarian crises developing in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. A woman who had been in charge of food distribution for her neighborhood, under the “Oil for Food” program, showed us her carefully maintained ledger books and angrily asked how all who had depended on the monthly food basket would now feed their families. Along with food shortages, we heard alarming reports about contaminated water and a possible outbreak of cholera in Basra and Hilla. For weeks, there had been no trash removal. Bombed electrical plants and sanitation facilities had yet to be restored. Iraqis who could help restore the broken infrastructure couldn’t make it through multiple check points to reach their offices; with communication centers bombed, they couldn’t contact colleagues. If the U.S. military hadn’t yet devised a plan for emergency relief, why not temporarily entrust projects to U.N. agencies with long experience of organizing food distribution and health care delivery?

Cathy, who is a nurse, Dr. April Hurley, and Ramzi Kysia, also a member of our group, arranged a meeting with the civil and military operations center, located in the Palestine Hotel, across the street from us. An official there dismissed them as people who didn’t belong there. Before telling them to leave, he did accept a list of our concerns, written on Voices in the Wilderness stationery.

The logo for our stationery reappeared a few hours later, at the entrance to the Palestine Hotel. It was taped to the flap of a cardboard box. Surrounding the logo were seven silver bullets. Written in ball-point pen on the cardboard was a message: “Keep Out.”

In response, Ramzi Kysia wrote a press release headlined: “Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The U.S. Military Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing In Iraq.”

Kathy Kelly holds Shoba at the Chamin-E-Babrak refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan, in January 2014, a few days after the child had been saved from a burning tent, during a fire that destroyed much of the camp. (Abdulhai Darya)

In 2008, our group, renamed Voices for Creative Nonviolence, was beginning a walk from Chicago to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. We asked Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid to speak at a “send-off” event. He encouraged and blessed our “Witness Against War” walk  but then surprised us by saying he had never heard us mention the war in Afghanistan, even though people there suffered terribly from aerial bombings, drone attacks, targeted assassinations, night raids and imprisonments. Returning from our walk, we began researching drone warfare, and then created an “Afghan Atrocities List,” on our website, carefully updating it each week with verifiable reports of U.S. attacks against Afghan civilians.

The following year, Joshua Brollier and I headed to Pakistan and then Afghanistan. In Kabul, Afghanistan, we were guests of a deeply respected non-governmental organization Emergency, which has a Surgical Centre for War Victims there.

Filippo, a sturdy young nurse from Italy who was close to completing three terms of service with Emergency, welcomed us. As he filled a huge backpack with medicines and supplies, he described how the hospital personnel managed to reach people in remote villages who have no access to clinics or hospitals. The trip was relatively safe since no one had ever attacked a vehicle marked with the Emergency logo. A driver would take him to one of Emergency’s 41 remote first aid clinics. From there, he would hike further up a mountainside and meet villagers awaiting him and the precious medicines he carried. In a previous visit, after he had completed a term in Afghanistan, he said people had walked four hours in the snow to come and say goodbye to him. “Yes,” he said, “I fell in love.”

How different Filippo’s report was from those compiled in our Afghan Atrocities List. The latter tells about U.S. special operations forces, some of the most highly trained warriors in the world, traveling to remote areas, bursting into homes in the middle of the night, and proceeding to lock the women in one room, handcuff or sometimes hogtie the men, rip apart closets, mattresses and furniture, and then take the men to prisons for interrogation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch filed chilling reports about torture of Afghan prisoners held by the U.S.

In 2010, two U.S. Veterans for Peace, Ann Wright and Mike Ferner, joined me in Kabul. We visited one of the city’s largest refugee camps. People faced appalling conditions. Over a dozen, including infants, had frozen to death, their families unable to purchase fuel or adequate blankets. When the rain, sleet and snow came, the tents and huts become mired in mud. Earlier, I had met with a young girl there whose arm had been cut off, her uncle told me, by a U.S. drone attack. Her brother, whose spine was injured, huddled under a blanket, inside their tent, visibly shaking.

Opposite the sprawling refugee camp is a huge U.S. military base. Ann and Mike felt outraged over the terrible contrast between the Afghan refugee camp with a soaring population of people displaced by war, and the U.S. base housing military personnel who had ample supplies of food, water, and fuel.

Most of the funds earmarked by the U.S. for reconstruction in Afghanistan have been used to train and equip Afghan Defense and Security forces. My young friends in the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APV) were weary of war and didn’t want military training. Each of them had lost friends and family members because of the war.

In December 2015, I again visited Emergency’s Surgical Centre for War Victims in Kabul, joined by several Afghan Peace Volunteers. We donated blood and then visited with hospital personnel. “Are you still treating any victims of the U.S. bombing in Kunduz?” I asked Luca Radaelli, who coordinates Emergency’s Afghan facilities. He explained how their Kabul hospital was already full when 91 survivors of the U.S. attack on the Kunduz hospital operated by Médecins Sans Frontières were transported for five hours over rough roads to the closest place they could be treated, this surgical center. The Oct. 15 attack had killed at least 42 people, 14 of whom were hospital staff.

Kathy Kelly and Voices in the Wilderness delegation with Afghan Peace Volunteer friends in Bamyan, Afghanistan, in 2010 (Hakim Young)

Even though Kunduz hospital staff had immediately notified the U.S. military, the U.N., and the Afghan government that the U.S. was bombing their hospital, the warplane continued bombing the hospital’s ER and intensive care unit, in 15-minute intervals, for an hour and a half.

Luca introduced our small team to Khalid Ahmed, a former pharmacy student at the Kunduz hospital, who was still recovering. Khalid described the terrible night, his attempt to literally run for his life by sprinting toward the front gate, his agony when he was hit by shrapnel in his spine, and his efforts to reassemble his cell phone — guards had cautioned him to remove the batteries so that he wouldn’t be detected by aerial surveillance — so that he could give a last message to his family, as he began to lose consciousness. Fortunately, his call got through. His father’s relatives raced to the hospital’s front gate and found Khalid in a nearby ditch, unconscious but alive.

Telling his story, Khalid asked the Afghan Peace Volunteers about me. Learning I’m from the U.S., his eyes widened. “Why would your people want to do this to us?” he asks. “We were only trying to help people.”

Images of battered and destroyed hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of hospital personnel trying nevertheless to heal people and save lives, help me retain a basic truth about U.S. wars of choice: We don’t have to be this way.

Admittedly, it’s difficult to uproot entrenched systems, like the military-industrial-congressional-media-Washington, D.C., complex, which involves corporate profits and government jobs. Mainstream media seldom help us recognize ourselves as a menacing, warrior nation. Yet we must look in the mirror held up by historical circumstances if we’re ever to accomplish credible change.

The recently released “Afghanistan Papers” criticize U.S. military and elected officials for misleading the U.S. public by covering up disgraceful military failures in Afghanistan. Pentagon officials were quick to dismiss the critiques, assuring an easily distracted U.S. public that the documents won’t impact U.S. military and foreign policy. Two days later, UNICEF reported that more than 600 Afghan children had died in 2019, because of direct attacks in the war. From 2009 through 2018, almost 6,500 children lost their lives in this war.

Addressing the U.S. Senate and Congress during a visit to Washington, D.C., Pope Francis voiced a simple, conscientious question. “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?” Answering his own question, he said: “the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood.”

What are the lessons learned from the rampage, destruction and cruelty of U.S. wars? I believe the most important lessons are summed up in the quote on Cynthia Banas’s T-shirt as she delivered water to Marines in Baghdad, in April, 2003: “War Is Not the Answer”; and in an updated version of the headline Ramzi Kysia wrote that same month: “Heavy-handed & Hopeless, The US. Military Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing” -in Iraq, Afghanistan or any of its “forever wars.”

• Originally published by National Catholic Reporter

            <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Friday, January 3rd, 2020 at 10:30pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/asia/afghanistan/" rel="category tag">Afghanistan</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/children/" rel="category tag">Children/Youth</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/asia/middle-east/iraq/" rel="category tag">Iraq</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/asia/afghanistan/kabul/" rel="category tag">Kabul</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/economics/sanctions-economics/" rel="category tag">Sanctions</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/" rel="category tag">United States</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/us-lies/" rel="category tag">US Lies</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/us-media/" rel="category tag">US Media</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/us-military/" rel="category tag">US Military</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/us-terrorism/" rel="category tag">US Terrorism</a>.