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Trump says the US is “loading up the ships” with weapons during ceasefire talks

April 11, 2026

Kevin , wsws, 11 April 2026

Residents gather near charred cars and buildings, at the site of Wednesday’s Israeli airstrike, in Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, April 10, 2026. [AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti]

On Friday, during a phone interview with the New York Post, President Trump said US warships were being reloaded with weapons to be used against Iran in anticipation of a failure of the ceasefire talks taking place in Pakistan.

When asked if he thought the negotiations would be successful, he said, “We’re going to find out in about 24 hours. We’re going to know soon.” Trump’s remarks are an unmistakable indication that the two-week pause in the US air assault on Iran he announced on Tuesday has resolved nothing and is being used to prepare the next stage of the war.

Trump made clear that the Pentagon is replenishing its weaponry during the pause in the air assault. He said, “We have a reset going. We’re loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made—even better than what we did previously, and we blew them apart.”

Emphasizing that a return to warfare was on the agenda, Trump repeated himself, “But we’re loading up the ships. We’re loading up the ships with the best weapons ever made, even at a higher level than we used to do a complete decimation. And if we don’t have a deal, we will be using them, and we will be using them very effectively.”

Reports from multiple outlets since Tuesday show that Iran retains control over the passage through the Strait of Hormuz, with shipping still restricted and, in some accounts, subject to Iranian oversight or tolling arrangements. Disturbed by Iran’s control of the strait and the fact that this is being reported widely by the corporate media, Trump posted on Truth Social at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, “The Iranians are better at handling the Fake News Media, and ‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!” 

A report by CBS News said data compiled by MarineTraffic shows that only 22 ships have passed through the strait since Tuesday. Estimates of shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf indicate a significant bottleneck of over 600 total commercial vessels at a standstill, approximately 400 of which are oil tankers, and not moving through the strait.

A few minutes later, Trump escalated his threats against Iran, writing, “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways. The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!”

There are major conflicts within the US ruling establishment over whether the talks will produce any results because of Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon. Iranian officials have warned that time is running out, while US officials are trying to preserve the ceasefire before it expires on April 22.

However, based on Trump’s comments to the New York Post, it is likely the Israeli attacks on Lebanon are being used to deliberately sabotage talks that function as a cover for preparations to restart the war on a far higher level.

The truce discussions are taking place in Islamabad, with Pakistan mediating and a large US delegation involved, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio and Adm. Brad Cooper, alongside officials from the National Security Council, State Department and Pentagon.

On the Iranian side, reports say the delegation arrived in Islamabad and is headed by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and other senior officials also included. Reuters described the meeting as “make-or-break,” and other reports say the two sides remain far apart on core issues.

The official line is that the talks are meant to translate the ceasefire into a longer standing arrangement, but there is no agreement over whether Lebanon is covered. Pakistan and Iran have said that the ceasefire framework includes Lebanon, while the White House and Israel have denied it. 

Iran’s position is tied to Israel’s continued expansion of the war in Lebanon. Iranian state-linked comments reported in the press have framed the Lebanese front as inseparable from Iran’s own security, with Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Seyed Majid Mousavi warning that “Aggression towards Lebanon is aggression towards Iran,” and promising a “heavy response.” 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who previously said there is “no cease-fire in Lebanon,” agreed on Thursday to start direct negotiations with Lebanon after Trump urged restraint by Israel, and the European imperialist leaders warned that the attacks on Lebanon threatened to collapse the ceasefire with Iran.

Recent reporting says that more than 1.2 million people have been displaced since the beginning of the conflict, with the UN citing evacuation orders covering 14 percent of the country. On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least 303 people and injured more than 1,000, the deadliest day so far in the war that began on March 2.

The scale of destruction is also being measured in infrastructure collapse. Reports cite strikes on roads, bridges, hospitals and commercial districts, with aid delivery badly disrupted and parts of the south rendered non-functional. Like the Gaza genocide, this is not a limited border operation; It is a systematic campaign to make areas of Lebanon uninhabitable.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones

The correspondence of interests between Washington and Tel Aviv were expressed when Trump said on Wednesday that he had spoken with Netanyahu and that Israel would “tone it down” in Lebanon. Knowing full well the Iranian position on the Lebanon, Trump added, “I just think we need to be a bit more low-key,” and claimed Netanyahu would “ease up” and be “totally fine” on the Lebanon issue.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s latest statements make clear that Israel’s objective is not a pause but a political-military restructuring of Lebanon. He has said the talks with Lebanon will focus on “disarming Hezbollah” and establishing “peaceful relations” on Israeli terms, while also insisting that Israel will keep striking until its security conditions are met.

These remarks should be understood alongside the fact that the bombing of Lebanon continues. Israel is using negotiations as a cover to press its military campaign, not as a genuine path to de-escalation. Israeli strikes continued Thursday killing dozens more, with between 17 and 24 killed in specific strikes by Israel.

This is in fact the same modus operandi of the Trump administration itself. The “talks” in Islamabad are but a respite as the White House considers its next move to militarily impose the requirements of US imperialism onto the Iranian people.

The WSWS has consistently maintained that this war is part of the imperialist effort by Washington to subordinate the region to American interests. The US is pursuing “the obliteration of Iran as a state and a campaign of terror against the population,” and that the assault on Iran is tied to control over energy resources and preparation for wider a conflict, including against China and Russia.

As an anonymous senior defense official told Politico in March, “Iran is not the end. It’s the first test of a broader geopolitical reorientation. We’re rebuilding the capacity to project power simultaneously in multiple theaters—Eurasia, the Pacific, and the Middle East.”

This analysis identifies the present war as a warning of what is coming next. The aim of US imperialism is the domination of Iran as a major opening act in a broader global escalation. The Middle East war is the sharpest expression of the world crisis of capitalism.

The ceasefire talks in Islamabad cannot resolve a conflict rooted in imperialist strategy, Israeli expansionism and the drive of the US ruling class to redivide the region by force. With these objectives intact, the present truce will be unstable, and the threat of a far broader war will continue to hang over the region and the world.

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US War Machine Is Built on Decades of Lies. The Assault on Iran Is No Exception.

April 6, 2026

Trump’s endless falsehoods about the Iran war build on a long history of US military mythmaking.

By Scott Kurashige , Truthout Published April 5, 2026

A memorial for the victims of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school bombing is on display on March 28, 2026, in Tehran, Iran.

Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

The first casualty of war is the truth.

This truism — understandably repeated at the outset of each new U.S. war — is proving itself once again.

With all evidence pointing toward U.S. responsibility for the February 28 bombing of Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, President Trump claimed that the attack “was done by Iran.” In spreading this blatant misinformation, Trump was not in fact shattering presidential norms — rather, he was continuing a White House tradition.

Back in 1945, in a public statement announcing the U.S.’s atomic bomb strike on Japan, President Harry Truman falsely described the city of Hiroshima as “an important Japanese Army base.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians. The bomb targeted thousands of schoolchildren, including nearly 6,000 who died as part of a service patrol near the center of Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, more than 1,400 students and teachers at Shiroyama Elementary School were killed.

But like most students attending U.S. schools after World War II, I was taught that dropping the atomic bombs saved lives.

Related Story

A livestream shows Jerome Powell, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, speaking after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York City on March 18, 2026.

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Trump’s Iran War May Mark the Beginning of the End for Dollar-Backed US Empire

Radical economist Costas Lapavitsas discusses the crumbling of the dollar-backed world system and what could be next. By C.J. Polychroniou , Truthout

March 25, 2026

Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars. A jingoistic fervor following an explosion on the battleship USS Maine prompted the Spanish-American War in 1898. In 1964, LBJ cited a “phantom battle” to push the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing military intervention in Vietnam.

Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war. In his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, he retroactively offered his first attempt to justify the war, claiming without evidence that Obama’s nuclear deal made Iran a greater threat and that Iran was on the cusp of aiming missiles at “the American homeland.”

Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars.

Calling truth a casualty of war may imply, however, that truth survives between wars. But the reality is that militarism and the warfare state are sustained by lies which stretch over decades. The ideology of American exceptionalism is driven by the myth that U.S. intervention plays a unique role in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. Keeping the public uninformed and miseducated has been a key tactic to tamp down dissent.

The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory. This record of erasure has proven so effective that many of those speaking out against war crimes do not seem to understand the degree to which they, too, have been miseducated. Chastising the Trump administration’s response to the school bombing, The New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells recoiled at the notion of a mass civilian massacre being “treated by U.S. officials as the normal cost of waging war.”

That civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history has apparently been lost on Wallace-Wells and countless others. Racism and xenophobia play a crucial role in this erasure, as they are used to rally support for war while devaluing the millions of nonwhite lives lost in pursuit of U.S. interests. As General William Westmoreland said bluntly during the Vietnam War, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.”

In this way, war-related lies have been integral to the formation of our national identity.

Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war.

This is particularly true for the series of wars stretching across East, Central, and West Asia since the late 19th century that I researched for my book, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism. Rudyard Kipling’s invocation of “the white man’s burden” in his 1899 call for the U.S. to colonize the Philippines was unmistakably racist. But in its time, it was meant to be instructive: Waging the “savage wars of peace” required Americans to shed their “childish” innocence and embrace the brutish nature of imperial power.

The message was sadly taken to heart by U.S. troops in the Philippines, where lynching, torture, concentration camps, and mass murder became all too common. Some atrocities continued long after the U.S. declared an end to combat. In 1906, American troops on Jolo Island in the southern Philippines killed 1,000 Moro people in what the U.S. recorded as a great military victory over Muslim fanatics in the “Battle of Bud Dajo.” Recounted by historian Kim A. Wagner, it was a horrific massacre, whose victims included women and children, as well as outgunned or unarmed men attempting to surrender.

Regarding the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, Robert McNamara admitted, “In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children.” After WWII, McNamara served as secretary of defense, overseeing the escalation of the Vietnam War that resulted in over 3 million deaths. The My Lai massacre, which was marked by wanton slaughter and sexual assault — was initially recorded as a successful defeat of “enemy” combatants in March 1968, but more accurate news about it finally broke through decades of silence on U.S. war crimes. Most Americans quickly bracketed it off, a horrific exception rather than the culmination of a pattern.

But My Lai was a near replay of tragedies from the Korean War that the U.S. military systematically covered up. South Koreans had long memorialized the hundreds of unarmed and defenseless civilians, from babies to elders, massacred by U.S. soldiers at No Gun Ri. It was only brought to the attention of the U.S. public, however, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning team of Associated Press reporters nearly a half-century later. Even today, mainstream histories largely ignore U.S. military involvement in the brutal partition and occupation of Korea.

And My Lai was far from the only civilian massacre in Vietnam. Indeed, on the same day, dozens of Vietnamese civilians in My Khe were killed by U.S. troops. American soldiers commonly used the most vile, racist epithets and dehumanizing stereotypes to characterize Vietnamese people — both combatants and civilians, friends and foes alike. “Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, [and] imprisonment without due process,” as author Nick Turse documented in Kill Anything That Moves, “were virtually a daily fact of life” for Vietnamese people.

The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory.

Although the U.S. defeat in Vietnam caused veterans like Colin Powell to adopt a more protective approach to the deployment of U.S. troops, the pattern of civilian massacres continued. On February 13, 1991, over 400 Iraqi civilians taking refuge in a shelter were killed in Amiriyah by two laser-guided “smart bombs” in the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Though in this case U.S. officials did acknowledge the civilian deaths, they were largely dismissed as “collateral damage” from a strike on a military target.

Amnesty International investigated 10 incidents involving at least 140 civilians, including at least 50 children, killed in the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan, for which there were no war crimes prosecutions of any kind. Retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the former deputy national security advisor, acknowledged, “We virtually never held anyone accountable for civilian casualties.”

Whether actively or passively, our culture — just as it fails to value all American lives equally — has internalized the lies that elevate the value of American lives far above those who look like the enemy.

None of this is meant to imply that the U.S. always targets civilians deliberately or to deny that America’s enemies have committed atrocious crimes against humanity. Lies and dehumanization are a common tactic that all parties use in war. But with America’s unrivaled post-WWII military and economic superpower has come the concordant privilege to act with impunity, to disregard what the rest of the world thinks of us, and to dismiss the suffering of others.

Civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history.

When the Tokyo Trials were set up after World War II to prosecute Japanese war crimes, the U.S. ensured that the conduct of its military was barred from review, setting in motion a chain of disregard for equitable governance under international law. Since 2002, the U.S. has failed to endorse the International Criminal Court. The Trump administration has gone much further, attacking and placing sanctions on its judges, while waging war on Iran with Israel as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for arrest by the ICC for war crimes in Gaza.

The incremental steps our own government has taken have been rapidly reversed, as well. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” bombastically declared that “We negotiate with bombs,” while expressing disdain for “stupid rules of engagement.” Signaling this intent last year, he dismantled Pentagon programs intended to mitigate civilian harm. Such actions complement the misinformation campaign to eliminate “controversial” and “unpatriotic” topics from our public schools and national monuments.

But as the latest wrongheaded war reveals another layer of the United States’s limitations and declining power, those imperial privileges are waning. Trump’s threat to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure should be opposed because it is a war crime in the making against innocent people and because such attacks could boomerang into a global economic meltdown, intensifying suffering at home and abroad.

Holding the individuals responsible for these decisions accountable — at the ballot box and under international law — is just the first step that people in the U.S. can take to become responsible citizens of a global community and stop the next atrocities before they occur. But we cannot wait for change to come from those at the top.

Historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has chronicled the diverse U.S. activists who built transnational and multiracial solidarity through travels to Vietnam while it was under siege from the U.S. Since the 1990s, the International Women’s Network Against Militarism has brought U.S. educators, artists, and activists together with women in many of the places most impacted by war and the negative effects of permanent overseas U.S bases. Their multifaceted efforts to overcome militarism advance a decolonial model of solidarity crossing Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean.

More recently, the humanitarian aid flotillas acting to alleviate starvation and death in Gaza and Cuba owing to Israel’s and the U.S.’s respective illegal blockades serve as important examples of the people-to-people relations necessary to break the chain of the lies that have torn us apart for too long. Reckoning with the legacy of empire ultimately requires a level of awareness that can best be achieved through these forms of solidarity from below.

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Dennis Kucinich: How to Stop the War

April 3, 2026

Consortium News, April 2, 2026

The power of the purse is the surest way Congress can stop the Iran war, or any war. If Congress funds war, Congress authorizes it. If Congress cuts off funds, a war will end.

No War On Iran protest at the White House, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Dennis Kucinich
Substack

Up to 15,000 of the 50,000 American troops in the Middle East region are being positioned to participate in an assault on Kharg Island, Iran’s critical oil export hub, with the aspiration that America, once in control of Kharg, will turn the tables and assume dominance, opening the Strait of Hormuz for the U.S. and allies, while cutting off Iran from its major source of oil revenue.

Marines and paratroopers, with air and naval support, are poised to invade Kharg’s heavily defended 25-mile coast which features rocky terrain, cliffs and in some places, flat limestone surfaces, each presenting its own strategic calculus and hazards. Special Operations may be tasked with the mission of capturing Iran’s enriched uranium, an equally perilous task.

The U.S. cannot invade and/or hold Kharg Island without taking heavy casualties. Iran has been preparing more than 20 years for an assault on the island and U.S. troops could face potential annihilation with counter-attack coming from all directions, air, land and sea, giving new meaning to Kharg Island’s nickname, ‘The Forbidden Island.’

Our political leaders and their military advisors, unless they have been so infected with the virus of war that they have gone mad, must know our troops are facing slaughter.

We could be witnessing the tragic unfolding of a 21st century version of Custer’s Last Stand, where, at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June of 1876, General George Custer and 215 troops in his command were killed, thoroughly routed by the spiritual and strategic wisdom of native Indian leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and their followers.

Custer’s troops had been sent by the U.S. government to reclaim Dakota Sioux land in the Black Hills after the discovery of gold in 1874.

Hubris is not limited to time and space. Underestimation of the strength of the opposition, an aggressive battle doctrine which ignored risk to life, overconfidence and cultural bias were operative at Little Big Horn and are abundantly present today among the Trump Administration’s advisors.

There should be no ground invasion of Kharg or other Iranian islands. There should be no further bombing runs or missile attacks on Iran. It is time to de-escalate, and quickly, to avoid further loss of life, and the world-wide collapse of food, fertilizer, fuel and other basic necessities.

Iran’s Kharg Island, 1973. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

I am not new to the hazards of malignant U.S. foreign policy. As a member of Congress, I led the effort against the Iraq. War. Over several years, I made 155 speeches in the House of Representatives, specifically cautioning against an attack on Iran, and urging diplomacy.

President Trump has fumbled for explanations for this war. It was for Israel, for regime change, to get rid of enriched uranium, to get rid of Iran’s missiles, and yesterday, according to the Financial Times, the naked reason is blood for oil.

Quoting the president:

“to be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.”

Donald Trump meet Forrest Gump: “Stupid is as stupid does.” (Like cancelling the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 and then complaining the Iranians are not abiding by it, or killing Iran’s chief negotiator, Ali Larijani , and then grousing there is no one with whom to negotiate.)

In the alternative, perhaps the president and his cronies having recently seized control of $150 billion of oil in Venezuela, are criminal masterminds, using the U.S. military as enforcers for private gain.

The president explained his ‘Rule of (liquid) Gold to The New York Times: “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking (Venezuela’s) oil.”

Favored administration insiders make billions through stock manipulations, with advance knowledge of president’s market-pacing blurbs, underscoring war as a gigantic grift.

Bipartisan Knavery & Duplicity

During my service as a member of Congress, I challenged bipartisan knavery and duplicity.

I sued three presidents for violating the Constitution’s war powers, Democrat and Republican alike: Bill Clinton over Serbia, George W. Bush over Iraq, and Barack Obama over Libya.

I presented Articles of Impeachment charging both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney with violations of the Constitution. I did so as both parties repeatedly enabled war, not only through the vainglorious, corrupt actions of the Executive branch, but through Congressional nonfeasance.

Congress has failed to exercise its fundamental constitutional responsibilities relating to the War Power, as well as abandoned its preeminent role to curtail war through using the appropriations process.

Here is what I have witnessed as a member of Congress: The Democratic Party, aware of the public’s fatigue over the war in Iraq, ran its 2006 campaign on a promise to end that war.

The second the Democrats returned to power, leaders pledged to continue to fund the war, the very war they promised to end.

The bait and switch of the Democratic Party in the 2006 campaign, promising peace and delivering war, led me to run for president a second time, on a platform of Strength through Peace.

In 2024, Donald Trump promised peace. It was the cornerstone of his campaign. He excited a crossover vote, won the election and he, too, gave us the opposite, under the slogan “Peace through Strength,” followed by heavy military spending and imperial policies which either provoke or initiate war.

A Vote for War 

The U.S. Capitol at night from the Library of Congress, 2021. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

If you want to see this war brought to an end, remember this: An appropriations vote is a vote for war. If your congressional representative votes for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), they vote for war.

This is not about disarming. It is about Congress deciding, on our behalf, limitations on aggression. If Congress votes for a supplemental appropriation to replenish missile stocks, and other armaments, they vote for war.

A congressperson cannot truthfully say they oppose war if they have voted to fund war.

The power of the purse is the surest means by which Congress can stop the Iran war, or any war. If Congress funds war, Congress authorizes it. If Congress cuts off funds, this war will be brought to an end.

The Democratic leader of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, has kept open the possibility of support for an additional $200 billion for the Iran War. This in advance of the 2027 annual war appropriation which the president has doubled, requesting $1.5 trillion, (about 80 percent of current discretionary spending).

The use of the power of the purse is the only means by which Congress can stop this war.

Members of Congress supporting a ground attack on Iran have failed to fulfill one of the most important constitutional responsibilities: Only Congress can legally take the American people from peace to a state of war and put America’s sons and daughters in harm’s way. Since Congress will not formally vote on a declaration of war, it enables war to be pursued through appropriations.

The economic costs of war against Iran, already approaching $40 billion, pale in consideration to the moral costs. The murder of 168 girls by a U.S. Tomahawk missile which struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school, in Minab, Iran on Feb. 28, will forever be a blot on our nation’s conscience.

The assassination of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s chief of state and religious leader as horrifying as it was illegal. The ongoing loss of thousands of Iranian civilian lives due to U.S. and Israeli bombing similarly violates international law, as well as the U.S.’ own laws and cries out for justice.

And we must never forget the price which American military families have already paid in loss of life or injury to their loved ones.

The wanton devastation our own government inflicts upon others in distant lands, our detachment from the carnage visited upon innocent people abroad, will return home in more coffins, more fractured families and pile misery upon misery in other, incalculable ways.

We cannot escape the consequences of the wrongful decisions of our leaders who disregard the U.S. Constitution, violate international and humanitarian law and capriciously kill civilians in other nations, ultimately placing American lives, both military and civilian, at risk.

Another Crime Against Humanity

Funeral of the children of the primary girls’ school in Minab, Iran, who were killed in the U.S.-Israeli bombing on Feb. 28. (Tasnim News Agency/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)

The Iran war is, much like the attacks against the people of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, a crime against humanity, compounded by every bomb and missile strike paid for with our tax dollars. President Trump’s repeated threats to obliterate civilian Iranian energy and water infrastructure are textbook war crimes.

Throughout my career I had no hesitation to challenge the unconstitutional abuse of the war power. Federal courts have consistently declined to intervene in disputes between Congress and the president over war powers.

An appropriations vote is the prime political mechanism to start, continue, or to end a war. A “Yes” vote for a Pentagon appropriation is a vote for war. Period.

Exercising the power of the purse, voting “No” on appropriations which enable war, is the only means by which Congress can stop this war and any other war. If Congress funds war, Congress authorizes war.

Congress also has the War Powers Resolution, which can set a deadline for ending hostilities. Recently, Democratic leadership declined to force a War Powers vote, even as there was bipartisan support.

Ultimately, the financial support for war is not about Democrat versus Republican. Both parties have been captured by foreign and domestic interests that profit from endless war.

Our present leaders will continue to search for false justification was the Iran war, seeking to justify the unjustifiable profligate arms spending.

The cost of the Iran War will felt across the country, at the gas pump, and at the supermarket, while our government quibbles over feeding Americans through the SNAP program, as our farmers are go bankrupt. Is there any clearer demonstration that America has lost its way when its way is war?

A nation weakens itself, not through a single decision, but through a pattern of choices that place wars of choice above the well-being of its own people.

We the People Face a Choice

Trump saluting the transfer of six U.S. servicemembers killed in the Middle East on March 18 at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. (White House / Abe McNatt)

We the People also face a choice. Continued militarization of the budget brings militarization of thought, word and deed, precipitating more conflict, more wars and fewer resources for the needs of the American people, for jobs, wages, health care, education, and retirement security.

It is time for America to come home from the wars.

The midterm elections are approaching. Democrats and Republicans alike must be held accountable.

You, dear reader, have a voice, and it must be heard. Tell your member of Congress, clearly and without ambiguity, that spending more money for war is not acceptable.

It is time for a new path, and that path begins with you.

Get involved in the elections. Show up. Organize. Support candidates who respect the Constitution, who understand the cost of war, and who will not vote to fund war.

Help ensure that those candidates who stand up for the Constitution and who believe in diplomacy and peace are the ones who prevail.

Only an active citizenry can change the outcome. A constitutional republic endures only when its citizens remain vigilant.

That responsibility now rests with you. With us. With We the People.

A Guide to Lobbying:

Find your member of Congress and both your senators:

Call their office directly (websites are linked from the directory above) or phone the Capitol Switchboard and politely ask to be transferred: 1 (202) 224-3121

Ask for your representative’s office. Politely speak to staff. They are usually very young so be nice to them. They are likely as intimidated as you may feel if this is your first time to lobby like this.

Say something like, “My name is XXX. I am a constituent and a primary voter. Please ensure that our representative votes NO on any WAR APPROPRIATIONS BILL.”

Please also write to your representatives. Contact makes a difference. You can also go to their District or D.C. offices in person. Schedule ahead of time if you want to have an official meeting. Bring your friends, family and community with you! Your engagement makes a difference.

Be respectful, polite and confident in what you are asking for.

Kucinich statement after Trump’s Wednesday night address to the nation on Iran:

“The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sale pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover.

Civilian and military casualties are mounting across the region. Lives are being extinguished while triumphalist and violent rhetoric is offered as justification. War is being escalated in the name of peace, a contradiction that demands moral clarity, not political acceptance.

Each life lost carries equal value. No nation’s suffering is expendable. No people exist as collateral.

Iran is not an abstraction, nor just a target on a map. It is one of the great cradles of civilization, a society whose cultural and intellectual contributions long predate the rise of the modern West.

To speak casually of bombing such a nation ‘back to the Stone Age’ reveals a colonial mindset that dehumanizes others and diminishes our own humanity in the process.

The extensive bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, along with Iran’s counterstrikes, is already taking innocent lives. The global economy is destabilizing as a result.

Energy markets are being disrupted. Oil and gas production is constrained. Fertilizer supply chains are impaired. Critical materials are being cut off.

These consequences will be felt worldwide. Yet the deeper crisis is not economic, it is moral.

We have seen this before. The repeated invocation of a nuclear threat echoes the false claims of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

That war cost thousands of American lives, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and trillions of dollars, while leaving a legacy of instability and grief that endures to this day.

If the President truly sought to prevent a nuclear Iran, he would not have abandoned the JCPOA, an agreement that placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, we are presented with a cycle of escalation that defies logic and invites catastrophe.

Political rhetoric is becoming increasingly radical and dangerous. This is not a question of partisan politics. It is a question of conscience with very real global and domestic consequences.

The American people are not called to accept this. They are called to stand against it.

Members of Congress must have the courage to exercise their constitutional authority and rein this in.

War framed as strength is destruction. Violence presented as necessity is gratuitous violence, with consequences already accelerating destabilizing shifts in the global order.

Congress must act. The Constitution vests in Congress the authority to bring this, and any war, to an end through the power of the purse.

The American people must immediately contact their representatives and demand a NO vote on any supplemental funding that would continue this war. Congress must VOTE NO.”

Dennis Kucinich is a former U.S. Congressman from Cleveland, Ohio, two-time presidential candidate, and founder of The Kucinich Report. Known for his unwavering commitment to peace, justice, and common sense, he has spent decades challenging war, corporate power, and political orthodoxy. Throughout his career, Kucinich led efforts to end U.S. military interventions abroad, championed domestic priorities like healthcare, workers’ rights and environmental protection, and promoted the creation of a Department of Peace. Today, through The Kucinich Report, he offers independent, insightful analysis of politics, foreign policy, and economic power — urging diplomacy, cooperation, and thoughtful leadership as a path toward a safer, more just world.

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Oppose the US imperialist war on Iran!

March 1, 2026
David North@davidnorthwsws, 28 Feb 2026

The attack on Iran ordered by Donald Trump and his war-crazed cabal is a massive political crime, illegal under international law and in direct violation of the US Constitution. It has been launched, in collaboration with the genocidal Israeli regime, without even the figment of authorization from Congress, against a country which has not attacked the United States and poses no threat to it.

Within the first hours of this criminal attack, at least 24 students were killed in an air strike on a girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran. How many thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands will be killed in the days ahead?

Only four days ago, Trump appeared before Congress and the American people to deliver his State of the Union address. Even though he had obviously decided to launch the war, he concealed his decision and barely mentioned Iran in the course of his two-hour rant.

Now, Trump, baseball cap on his head, announced his decision in the dead of night, while most Americans were sleeping. He has set the United States and the entire world on a disastrous course. This war will not solve the internal social crisis of American society, nor will it reverse the protracted deterioration in the global position of US capitalism.

All these contradictions, domestic and international, will be intensified. The war itself will inevitably escalate and engulf the entire planet.

No amount of media propaganda can disguise the fact that the attack on Iran is precisely what was described at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders back in 1945-46 as a “crime against peace.”

In the future, historians will compare Trump’s  February 28, 2026 attack on Iran to Hitler’s September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland. They are crimes of equal magnitude.

The Socialist Equality Party demands that the bloody assault on Iran be stopped immediately.

The working class and youth and all progressive and decent people must oppose this war, which has been launched in the interests of the financial-corporate oligarchy.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones

The same administration that has deployed ICE agents to terrorize American cities and neighborhoods, that is violating the Bill of Rights, is the same government that has launched this criminal war.

Call meetings in your factories, workplaces, schools and neighborhoods demanding the immediate end of this war.

The world must know that the American people oppose this war and want no part of it.

Take a stand. Make your voices heard.

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Trump Is the Symptom, U.S. Imperialism Is the Disease

May 5, 2025

admin — April 29, 2025

U.S. Peace Council Statement, April 29, 2025 —

Popular resistance to the Trump administration’s erratic, anti-people, and dangerous domestic and foreign policies is growing every day as seen with the massive demonstrations held throughout the country on and after April 5. We welcome these protests and the popular demands raised by them, but we must criticize significant flaws that block the political changes we desperately need.

Criticism is personalized against President Trump, Elon Musk, and the “billionaires” for actions that have been the hallmark of bipartisan policies for decades. Monied interests — not as individuals but as a class, and regardless of their political party — have always been in control of the U.S. government and have prioritized their interests over the interests of the majority, only limited by the organized people’s movements.

Personalizing the criticism and solely blaming the present administration for the problems created by both parties is tantamount to siding with one group of “billionaires” (Democrat) against the other (Republican). Such is the nature of the two-party duopoly as a system, regardless of personnel changes in the White House. Meanwhile, the entire U.S. body politic lurches from one administration to the next on a rightward trajectory toward fascism.

Largely organized by the Democratic party-based group Indivisible, the “Hands Off!” protests were silent about the U.S.’s bipartisan militaristic foreign policy and focused solely on domestic issues, except for “Hands Off NATO.” Revealingly, “Hands Off Palestine” was omitted from the official demands, though grassroots activists raised it.

This intentional silence on foreign policy, and its arbitrary separation from domestic issues, hide the fact that many domestic problems result from a militaristic foreign policy imposed on our country. Trillions of dollars of much needed funds are redirected from human needs to war mongering in Ukraine, West Asia, and Asia-Pacific. Achieving popular power can be most effectively galvanized if it is informed by politically and consciously recognizing the class basis of war and militarism. In contrast, official demands of the “Hands Off!” mobilization, with its embrace of NATO but silence on genocide in Gaza, obscures the class basis of war.

While official lawlessness did not start with Trump, the new president is bent on changing the present post-war imperialist order with another one that gives the empire even more impunity. The U.S. ruling class as a whole has been accelerating the tendency for the U.S. to operate outside the bounds of both national and international law, regardless of who is in office.

The West’s proxy war on Russia continues in Ukraine, while war clouds are gathering around creating another proxy war with the People’s Republic of China using Taiwan and South Korea. And, all the while, the U.S./Israel genocide continues against Palestine and its allies. The imminent war with Iran, supported by both parties, is yet another pressing issue that can best be explained within the framework of imperialism.

On top of all this, is a bipartisan commitment to enhance the repressive apparatus of the state domestically — from cop-cities to the repression on campuses, the criminalization of speech and assembly, restrictions on truthful education, and the further weaponization of the judicial system itself. Intensification of domestic austerity programs, deregulation and destruction of all government organizations that protect and enhance the lives of working people, and attacks on trade unions are the flip side for maintaining a militaristic empire.

All this should make clear that neither of the two billionaire-controlled parties will or can be the urgently needed opposition to imperialism. Current world conditions necessitate building an opposition movement to war and militarism that is even more materially focused on anti-imperialism. This requires understanding the clear link between the empire’s foreign and domestic policies and calling for an end to militarism and redirection of resources to human needs.

Instead of looking for the lesser of two evils, we urge joining people’s independent campaigns to cut the military budget, to close U.S. and NATO foreign military bases, to establish Zones of Peace in our region, and to stop the militarization of police and domestic repression. An anti-imperialist understanding is key to the success of our people’s struggle for peace and a more just society.

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𝐓𝐨𝐩 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐎 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐓𝐨 𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐖𝐚𝐫

November 26, 2024

Adm. Rob Bauer previously said NATO countries should consider shifting to a ‘war economy‘

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 25, 2024

The head of NATO’s Military Committee has called on European businesses to prepare for a “wartime scenario” amid soaring tensions between the Western military alliance and Russia.

Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer said Western businesses must adjust to become less vulnerable to both Russia and China. “If we can make sure that all crucial services and goods can be delivered no matter what, then that is a key part of our deterrence,” Bauer said at a European Policy Centre event in Brussels, according to Reuters.

Bauer said energy supplies could be targeted or used as weapons of war. “We’re seeing that with the growing number of sabotage acts, and Europe has seen that with energy supply,” he said. “We thought we had a deal with Gazprom, but we actually had a deal with Mr Putin. And the same goes for Chinese-owned infrastructure and goods. We actually have a deal with (Chinese President) Xi (Jinping).”

US and European officials have accused Russia of weaponizing energy, but Moscow began reducing gas shipments to Europe in 2022 in response to Western sanctions meant to destroy the Russian economy.

Bauer also said Western economies were too dependent on China. “We are naive if we think the Communist Party will never use that power. Business leaders in Europe and America need to realize that the commercial decisions they make have strategic consequences for the security of their nation,” he said. “Businesses need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly. Because while it may be the military who wins battles, it’s the economies that win wars.”

Last year, Bauer called for NATO countries to consider shifting to a “war economy” where civilian factories would begin producing military goods, similar to what the US did during World War II. “Those priorities should be discussed about, partially, a war economy in peacetime,” he said in January 2023.

Bauer also said at the time that NATO was “ready” for a direct confrontation with Russia. Today, that confrontation is much more likely following the US authorization of long-range strikes on Russian territory with NATO missiles, a step Moscow has made clear risks a nuclear escalation.

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Norman Solomon: From Genocide Joe to Omnicide Joe

November 25, 2024

President Biden Welcomes Ukrainian President Zelensky To The White House

U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky after a meeting in the East Room of the White House September 21, 2023 in Washington, D.C.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.

Norman Solomon, Nov 25, 2024, Common Dreams

President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”

That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks—and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.

Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”

In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide—defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”

That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.

While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.

With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.

In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.

Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.

Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.

From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers—even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list.

With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines—and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.

A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden’s reckless escalation hasn’t been even more reckless: “It’s been one long public debate after another, going back to ‘Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?’ First it’s no, then there’s a debate, then there’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, then it’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, and it’s yes. Now, ‘Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?’ After a long debate, now it’s yes.”

Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.

Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, “the stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.” In an ominous direction, “this needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation—the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.”

Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn’t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. “An average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say “their country should keep fighting until victory.”

Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants—a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.

Elites in Washington continue to posture as courageous defenders of freedom with military escalation in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have already died. Meanwhile, dangers of nuclear war increase.

Last week, Putin “lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,” Reuters reported, “and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles…. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.”

For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.

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Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback with a new afterword about the Gaza war in autumn 2024.

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Did God speak to the former US President G. W. Bush? Some reflections

August 8, 2015

Nasir Khan, August 8, 2015

“God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”
— George W. Bush, quoted in Lancaster New Era, July 16, 2004

Such was the claim of the former US President. He said this after the US armed forces had invaded and occupied two large countries, Afghanistan and Iraq. At that time, he was the most powerful leader of the mighty militarist superpower as well as a ‘divinely’ elevated person because God communicated with him. To my knowledge, in modern history we do not find another instance when a mortal man and the immortal God joined forces for U.S. to unleash two destructive wars! However, the implications of his pronouncements had a direct bearing on his political stature and his policies. Even though, he made his policies and issued his executive orders with the help of his close neoconservative advisers and secretaries but in doing so he was doing God’s work. God was speaking through him; therefore, God mandated whatever he did. God had chosen the right man to do His work!

If we accept the claims of divine guidance, for the sake of argument, that he, in fact, made on many times, then we can point to the results he achieved by his genocidal wars. Under his leadership, the US armed forces invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in the most brutal way. They killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans who had no quarrel with the people of the United States or posed any threat to the global U.S. hegemony and power. The destruction of Iraq was systematic. The Bush administration undertook the destruction of Iraqi state and its infrastructure as a necessary step to imposing the imperial diktat in the Middle East. It uprooted the social and administrative structure of Iraq and replaced it with sectarian puppet regimes that followed the orders of Washington and the Pentagon.

To make the imperial take-over easy and to neutralise any resistance to the new geopolitical order in this vast and oil-rich country, imperial masters used sectarian discord of the population as a convenient tool. How did it matter to Bush if Sunni and Shia turned against each other and started terrorist violence against their own people – the people of Iraq? Religious fanatics and miscreants were free to weaken Iraq while the occupiers could have an easy task to control the country and its resources. Thus, the US occupation could continue with greater ease while the country was drenched in bloodshed and mayhem that is still going on.

Through his destructive policies in the occupied Iraq, the Bush administration destabilised the whole region and played with the lives of millions of Iraqis by reducing them to destitution, poverty, homelessness and helplessness. The rampant killings in Iraq have claimed the lives of uncountable victims. In the first 7 years of US occupation, about 1.3 million Iraqi died. The main source of this incredible catastrophe that engulfed Iraq in 2003 was the US invasion. The ultimate responsibility of the present cycle of violence and bloodshed remains with Mr Bush.

Mr Bush’s military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan resulted in large-scale deaths of Afghans. The brutal treatment of the prisoners of war and the innocent victims in the process of occupying Afghanistan is a dark chapter in the history of twenty-first century. The occupying power violated the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, international humanitarian conventions and all norms of international law. All this happened because God said to Bush to do so! In fact, this is a preposterous assertion that even Al Capone would not have resorted to! Let us take a common sense view of his claim and its consequences. What that means is that the former president is not responsible for the wars and war crimes but someone else is! In legal terms, he is implying that God is vicariously responsible for his wars and war crimes. In this way, he absolves himself of any responsibility for his actions and his policies as the head of US Government! A very convenient but cheap method to deceive the world, no doubt!

There is no need for us to enter into any lengthy theological discourse on God and his attributes. It is common knowledge that most believers see God as a kind, merciful and loving power. For having such attributes, believers hold Him in high respect and praise Him. It is hard to think that the Heavenly Father, as Christians call God, could have asked or encouraged Mr Bush to start major wars of aggression and commit the most heinous crimes against other weaker nations in this century. In brief, to impute such designs to God or because of fulfilling a mission from God is a reprehensible act on the part of Mr Bush. In the eyes of any sincere believers, he is maligning God in a vicious way if he believes in Him as he seemingly professes to do.

Alternatively, what if he really believed in what he asserted about God? That is something, which we can look at cursorily from a legal point of view. In criminal law, the actions of the alleged offenders are primarily judged for the mens rea – that is, their state of mind and intentions when they committed some indictable offence. In some cases, they are entitled to the defence of diminished responsibility or diminished capacity if their mental condition was impaired in such a way that they did not fully understand what they did. If such a defence is successful, the accused are given mitigated sentences or sent for medical treatment, depending on the gravity of offences involved. In an old case of acute insanity, one person beheaded a sleeping man just to see what he would do when woke up in the morning but didn’t find his head!

There are many cases when people hear sounds or messages from some unknown sources exhorting them to do something that may amount to a criminal offence. A hallucination is a perception that is not based on objective reality. It is very much a subjective condition of mind and in this condition, people may see or visualise things that having nothing to do with reality. In this age, we come across cases when some people say they have heard God or God has given them some message. If Mr Bush is sincere in his claims about God speaking to him, then that is something for which only the professional psychologists can offer their expert views.

In case  a judicial miracle (which I don’t see taking place!) takes place and the world sees the former US president, G.W. Bush, being prosecuted for his wars and the alleged war crimes in a court of law then the question of hallucinations would certainly be an issue in any legal process. However, facts point to a different direction: That he acted with deliberation and premeditation in pursuing his policies and his destructive wars.

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Causing genocide to protect us from terror

April 18, 2015

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. Follow him on Twitter

Published time: March 30, 2015 12:52

An Iraqi family watches U.S. soldiers in in Baquba early June 28, 2007. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)

An Iraqi family watches U.S. soldiers in in Baquba early June 28, 2007. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)

–

A report called Body Count has revealed that at least 1.3 million people have lost their lives as a result of the US-led “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s a report which should have made front page news across the world.

In the comprehensive 101 pagedocument ‘Body Count,’

Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, have produced figures for the number of people killed from September 11, 2001 until the end of 2013.

The findings are devastating: the in-depth investigation concludes that the ‘war on terror‘ has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan. As awful as that sounds, the total of 1.3 million deaths does not take into account casualties in other war zones, such as Yemen – and the authors stress that the figure is a “conservative estimate”.

“The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely,” the executive summary says.

Continues >>

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Avi Shlaim: The perils and pitfalls of patriotic history

February 8, 2014

–
Avi Shlaim. OpenDemocracy,  7 February 2014
 

War is said to be too serious a business to be left to the soldiers. By the same token, military history is too serious to be left to the politicians. When politicians pontificate about the past it is rarely in the disinterested pursuit of a complex truth.

Michael Gove’s perspective on the First World War is a classic example of a narrow, nationalistic, blinkered version of history. In an article in the Daily Mail, on 2 January 2014, the education secretary used the centenary of the Great War to declare war on “left-wing academics” whom he accused of peddling unpatriotic myths about Britain’s role in the conflict.

For Gove this was a plainly just war, a patriotic war in defence of the homeland and freedom, a war forced on Britain by imperial Germany’s “aggressively expansionist war aims”. British soldiers, according to Gove, went to war in 1914 to defend “the western liberal order”. Gove also argued that dramas such as Oh What a Lovely War and satires such as Blackadder enable left-wing myths to take hold, leading some people to denigrate the “patriotism, honour and courage” of those who fought and died for their country. Gove’s article provoked a barrage of angry responses, including one from Baldrick, Blackadder’s wily sidekick.

One of the fiercest counter-attacks on the education secretary came from the left-wing journalist Seamus Milne in an article entitled “An imperial bloodbath that’s a warning, not a noble cause” (The Guardian, 9 January). Milne dismissed Gove’s claims about the war and its critics as “preposterous nonsense”. For Milne the 1914-18 bloodbath was not just a war: “It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources”.

Continues >>

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