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John Grant's Posts

  • Looking for a Straight Answer
    Thursday, September 2, 2010 - 01:54

    Last Saturday, I pondered America’s soul.

    I was in Portland, Maine, attending the annual Veterans For Peace convention, which featured Chris Hedges as its keynote speaker. Hedges, a Harvard divinity graduate who worked for many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Bosnia and other...

  • President Obama and the Curse of the Muslim Seed
    Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - 16:54

    “Taft is a fathead.” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1912)

    The anti-gay blog QueerHunt has just launched an expose that General David Petraeus is gay and has a secret Arab boyfriend he periodically meets in a Dubai hotel. The young man goes by the code name ‘awrence, an...

  • Maintaining the Empire
    Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 01:50

    First it was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attacking the “professional left” (whatever that means) for wanting to "eliminate the Pentagon." Then the liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd kicked the left for “constantly sniping at Obama" and for considering "pragmatism a moral...

  • Bradley Manning and the Secret World
    Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - 22:47

    Poor Bradley Manning. The kid can’t catch a break. Not only does the military have him locked in some inhuman solitary hole where they can slow-torture him using the latest approved methods, now his troubled private life is being broadcast for all to see.

    After running 75,000 secret...

  • American Stupidity
    Monday, August 9, 2010 - 02:32

    “Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.”
    Sophocles

    What is it about Americans that they have so much going for them, yet they can be so very stupid?

    Two stories in the Sunday New York Times jumped out as a sad backdrop to our misguided War On...

  • The New Afghanistan Policy: Murder Inc.
    Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - 00:23

    Let me get this straight. Robert Gates, the Secretary-Of-Defense-For-Life, is touring the TV news shows and major newspapers pleading with great angst lines in his forehead that WikiLeaks is “guilty” and “morally culpable” for releasing 75,000 field reports from Afghanistan to the American...

  • Letter to an American Hero
    Wednesday, July 28, 2010 - 00:25

    This letter is being sent to PFC Bradley Manning at the following prison address in Kuwait. For obvious reasons, I’ve left my return address off this posting.

    Inmate PFC Bradley Manning
    TFCF - Theater Field Confinement Facility
    APO AE 09366 USA

    Dear PFC Manning...

  • The Long War: Just Say 'No'
    Monday, July 19, 2010 - 23:20

    Military violence has such a death-grip on national policy in America, it’s hard for citizens to grasp there are real alternatives to war.

    Marine General James Mattis, the man appointed by President Obama to replace General David Petraeus as leader of the Central Command that oversees all...

  • The Battle between the First and the Second Amendments
    Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - 01:18

    There is a contest going on in America between the First and Second Amendments as to which has more favor in our court system. It's a face off between gun violence and freedom of the press and it involves individuals, giant corporations and standing armies.

    ...

  • Long wars, violence and change in America
    Monday, July 5, 2010 - 23:01

    It’s tough these days being a non-violent peace activist. Many see the notion of “peace is the way” as laughable, and the government equates peace with military domination.

    The bi-partisan War Party in America won’t budge from its imperial wars despite majority polls and protests urging...

  • Holding our soldiers accountable
    Monday, June 28, 2010 - 09:58

    The US Army is holding Specialist Bradley Manning incommunicado in Kuwait on charges of leaking to WikiLeaks video of Apache helicopter pilots gunning down two Reuters cameramen and a number of Iraqis in a Baghdad neighborhood. The video is devastating in what it reveals about cold-blooded hi-...

  • It's the war, stupid
    Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 02:28

    Following the tidal wave of media buzz over General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, you quickly notice the story succumbing to the gravity of our media-circus culture, to the point it has become a story about celebrity and score keeping.

    Would Obama fire McChrystal? How...

  • Truth through a soda straw
    Thursday, June 17, 2010 - 08:59

    The truth about American politics is this: disguised by the theatrics of squabbling Democrats and Republicans, Washington governs according to limits prescribed by a fixed and narrow consensus. The two main parties collaborate in preserving that consensus. Doing so requires declaring out-of-...

  • Milo Minderbinder in Afghanistan
    Friday, June 11, 2010 - 01:43

    1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder
    "We're gonna come out of this war rich!"

    Yossarian
    "You're gonna come out rich. We're gonna come out dead."

    -From the Buck Henry screenplay of Catch 22

    No one has captured the absurd spirit of US war-...

  • In the Israeli minefield
    Thursday, June 3, 2010 - 01:29

    It’s like entering a minefield to seriously discuss Israel and Palestine, a tale of two peoples who claim the same land.

    I’ve entered this minefield before and have been called an ”anti-semite” and an “Israel hater” for saying pretty much what the sentence above suggests, that...

  • Unless otherwise directed ...
    Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - 10:40

    I’ve worked in journalism for 35 years. I did graduate study in journalism, I’ve worked as a daily newspaper reporter and I’ve freelanced magazine articles and newspaper op-eds. Now I blog.

    I’ve learned that certain ideas are not permitted in the mainstream press. Well-paid gatekeepers...

  • Honduras: Bad faith down in The Gulch
    Thursday, May 20, 2010 - 09:07

    In Spanish, the word honduras means depth. The example often used is meterse en honduras – to go beyond one’s depth. It comes from the adjective hondo – deep or low.

    I’ve often wondered what the Spanish conquistador or priest was thinking when he decided circa...

  • Mister Obama's War hits a speed bump
    Thursday, May 13, 2010 - 01:59

    Mister Obama’s War has hit a speed bump in Times Square. The question is will the President and members of Congress pay any attention to it and slow down, or will they floor the accelerator and race into Pakistan?

    The speed bump is a nobody named Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old,...

  • Saving Face in Afghanistan
    Friday, May 7, 2010 - 07:50

    In the documentary film “The Most Dangerous Man In America,” Daniel Ellsberg tells about a fellow Rand Corporation war planner circa 1968 who described the US commitment to the war in Vietnam this way:

    “We are 10 percent concerned about the Vietnamese; we are 20 percent concerned about...

  • Look for John Grant's first article on Thursday
    Saturday, May 1, 2010 - 04:41

    John Grant is a writer/photographer living just outside Philadelphia’s city limits. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and has published both fiction and non-fiction.

    Starting in the 1980s, he bummed around Central America and other places as a documentary...



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