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This has been an important year in the struggle for peace, freedom and democracy, and for the revival of real journalism as it was at least imagined by the founders of the nation.

We had the courageous act of NSA contract worker Edward Snowden, who blew a nuke-sized hole in the National Security Administration’s secret spying program that is still smoking, even as he has been forced to hole up as a refugee from repression in, of all places, Russia. We have had too, the courageous act of Jeremy Hammond, an activist and, yes, a journalist, who did what reporters at our so-called corporate “news” organizations should have done, and exposed the links between private intelligence operators, notably Stratfor, and the government spooks like the CIA and NSA, for which act Hammond was maliciously sentenced to 10 years in jail.

We have Chelsea Bradley Manning, the courageous soldier who alerted the world to the crimes of American power in Iraq and Afghanistan, who unapologetically admitted his actions, and who is now facing a long, hard prison sentence in a military brig at Leavenworth.

Most of the information about these people and what they have revealed, you have to learn by turning to the alternative media. The corporate media — print and electronic — hide it or filter it or sanitize it. Hell, they won’t even tell us the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan, just outed there by an opposition party. The rest of the world’s media are reporting his name — Craig Osth, a long-time CIA dirty trickster who was also once station chief for the Agency in Brazil, but our toothless media are keeping it secret from us here in the Land of the Free.

            In brutish, crass, profanity-spitting L.A., in developer-ravaged $2500-a-month “elegant density” L.A., in have-and-have-not ethnically separated L.A., in get-out-of-my-way-asshole, hit-and-run texting-and-primping-while-driving L.A. . . .

            Gentle things still happen.

            She sat at the front table at Papa Cristo’s, the Greek place at Pico and Normandie in the so-called Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Across the street from St. Sofia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral and St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, or, more appropriately considering that masses come with mariachis, Iglesia Santo Tomas Apostol.

            “This is excellent!” she said, and, really, it was amazing she could say anything at all, let alone in a clear, commanding voice. The withered and dry autumn leaves on the sycamore trees in the neighborhood were stronger. This was, to be indelicate, a corpse that hadn’t gotten around to officially dying. Stick limbs, prune skin, sunken cheeks. Talk about frailty, thy name is woman. . .

            “Okay, Babe,” said her companion, a young guy with brown curls pulled back in a pony tail. “I’ve got you.” And he steadied her as he removed her walker, and then helped her ease into a wooden chair at one of Papa Cristo’s wobbly tables. She didn’t seem comfortable.

            “Does your butt hurt?” said her companion.

            What butt, I wondered. Nothing there but bones.

Esther Cicconi, lifetime Communist and icon of LA's left fringe, says 'hello, not goodbye'

ThisCantBeHappening! just into its fourth year of publication, has learned that we have won our fourth Project Censored Award, this time for Dave Lindorff’s article Incidents raise suspicions on motive: Killing of Journalists by US Forces a Growing Problem, published in TCBH! on Nov. 22, 1012.

In a press release headlined The News that Didn’t Make the News, announcing release of this year’s book on the year’s most censored news, Censored 2014, Project Censored writes that the Committee to Protect Journalist had noted that the killing of journalists had risen 40% in 2012 over 2011, and had published a risk list of the most dangerous places to work as a journalist (Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Ecuador topped the list), and went on to say:
 

“The New York Times ran a story on the CPJ report on February 15, 2013, noting the alarming rise in the number of journalists killed and imprisoned during 2012. However, the Times’ report did not address the possible UN resolution or freedom of press as a transnational right.

“Dave Lindorff, of ThisCantBeHappening!, writes that ‘the incidence of journalists killed by US forces in recent US conflicts has been much, much greater than it ever was in earlier wars, such as the one in Vietnam, or in Korea or World War II,’ begging the question of whether some of the deaths have been ‘deliberate, perhaps with the intent of keeping journalists in line.'”
 

We’re proud to be operating a collectively-run news organization that, despite its small size (just a crew of seven) and limited resources (our annual budget approaches $4000!), we are averaging one Project Censored award per year, so far.

TCHB! wins a fourth Project Censored Award, and publication in this year's list of the top 25 censored stories of 2012-13 (click on image to buy the book)

 
All we are saying is give peace a chance
– John Lennon
 

Whether war or cooperation is the more dominant trait of humanity is one of the oldest questions in human discourse. There are no satisfying answers for either side exclusively, which seems to suggest the answer is in the eternal nature of the debate itself.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist. In an op-ed in The New York Times called “Are We Hard-Wired For War?” he tells a powerful story from Cherokee legend. A girl goes to her grandfather and tells him of a dream she had of two wolves viciously fighting. He tells her that her dream represents the “two forces within each of us struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other war.”

But, grandfather, she asks, who wins?

His answer: “The one you feed.”

I’m a Vietnam veteran and have been a member of Veterans For Peace for 28 years. In the 1990s, the organization took up the theme Abolish War!

I could never quite absorb what that meant. I always wanted to know who was going to hold the gun to the heads of the war-mongers of the world? Now, c’mon you guys, just stop that! The idea is still alive in the peace movement, as in the new book by David Swanson called War No More: The Case For Abolition.

President Obama, Iranian President Rouhani and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN Tuesday

I enthusiastically share the sentiments of the Abolish War! movement but doubt its effectiveness. Non-violence, in Gandhi’s sense as a “truth force,” is a powerful political tool to oppose unjust power, but how does anyone abolish war and make it just go away? War, by definition, would seem to trump such good-intentioned legislation. War isn’t something that can be ordered out of existence; it has to be wooed and coaxed into submission by forces working for peace. Fears have to be allayed. Furies have to be soothed.

For a timely explanation of the crisis of the militarization of America, days after popular opposition, in a historic first, blocked a US war — in this case against the sovereign nation of Syria — check out this film by Lanny Cotler and Paul Edwards of Class War Films

Click on the image to go to the YouTube video 'Military Cancer'

 
The media didn’t waste time lining up US leaders to trash Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent op-ed in The New York Times. There was the expected outrage that such a “dictator” and “tyrant” had the gall to lecture the United States of America. Bill O’Reilly referred to Putin as “a criminal monster.” Charles Krauthammer kept it real and called Putin “a KGB thug.”

My favorite Putin slam was from New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez put it this way: “When I read [the Putin op-ed] I felt like I wanted to vomit.”

That’s great. But the thought of Senator Menendez sometimes makes me want to vomit. I bet these days if the urge to vomit was given as a poll response to the mention of The United States Congress in general and Senator Menendez in particular, the urge to vomit would score very high.

Presidents Obama and Putin

I don’t mean to pick on Senator Menendez, but there is the scandal involving a too cozy relationship with a rich donor and allegations that while on a junket to the Dominican Republic the bachelor senator allegedly hired underage prostitutes. I certainly don’t care if Senator Menendez gets laid while junketing in the Caribbean. It’s his hypocrisy that makes me want to vomit. On the matter of prostitutes, Menendez took a righteous posture last year when secret servicemen on a presidential trip to Cartegena, Colombia were caught paying for sex. Menendez called loudly for the men to be fired, which they were.

When it comes to Syria and Russia and the use of chemical weapons against civilians, the matter of hypocrisy rises to a more profound level. The moral high ground all these Putin-bashers claim does not exist. Mention the words Vietnam, napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange, carpet bombing, cluster bombs, shock & awe and depleted uranium and the moral outrage begins to evaporate into crocodile tears meant to stir up more bloody war.

 
Responses to wrongdoing must not exacerbate problems.
– Jonathan Granoff, President, Global Security Institute
 
 
Watching news coverage of the debate over bombing Syria, one realizes there’s more going on than Barack Obama or John Kerry are telling Congress and the American people. Kerry may have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — but that doesn’t mean he has to tell the whole story.

The fact is there’s an elephant in the room everyone involved seems sworn to never mention. Or if it slips out, it suddenly gets silenced. That elephant is Israel.

Consider this little mind game: What if Syria and the rest of the volatile Middle East did not surround the tiny state of Israel? Would we still need to bomb Syria? With the Arab world in an uproar right now, tensions are especially high in Israel, thanks to its iron-walled determination to sustain a military occupation over native Palestinians.

Secretary of State John Kerry sees the Israel/Palestine crisis as one of his most important diplomatic challenges. It’s ironic that Kerry, once an eloquent antiwar Vietnam veteran, is now the Obama administration’s point man pushing hard for war and the bombing of Syria. The same irony haunts President Obama, a consistent opponent of the Iraq War and, of course, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bashar al-Assad, John Kerry, Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama

Let’s extend this mind game: What if Israel had been established in the early 20th century on the Africa continent between Chad and Darfur, which is in western Sudan. Imagine that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had voiced hatred for this tiny neighbor populated by refugees from Europe. When Bashir took up slaughtering many thousands of Darfurians, would the president of the United States have sent in cruise missiles — instead of what he did, which was nothing? In fact, while the US president damned Bashir’s slaughter on one hand, US Pentagon and Intelligence operatives met with Sudan’s chief military intelligence officers to iron out cooperation against terrorism. (In the hunt for al Qaeda, let’s not forget how Bill Clinton actually sent cruise missiles into Sudan to blow up what turned out to be a civilian pharmaceutical plant. It was a big embarrassment.)

 
Here we go again.

Polls suggest the American people are fed up after two full-bore wars and the killing of an ambassador in Benghazi following our escapade in Libya. Yet, the Obama administration seems poised to launch another war in Syria.

“We can’t do a third war in 12 years!”

This exasperated response was not from a lefty peace activist ready to do civil disobedience; it was from Colonel David Hunt on the Bill O’Reilly Show. Like many Americans, Hunt is not sure who let loose chemical weapons in a section of Damascus. He knows that canisters of chemical weapons can be delivered to a place in any number of ways from any number of sources. He says we need to ask, “Who benefits” from such an attack?

This is, of course, a very good question, since the Assad regime is currently winning the civil war in Syria and, thus, would not seem to have much of an incentive to use chemical weapons so blatantly. And, of course, a chemical attack is a perfect bloody shirt to provide anyone inclined to wave it to promote an attack, since President Obama made chemical weapons a “red line.”

.

Hunt was joined on the O’Reilly Show by the usually bloodthirsty right-wing militarist Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters. He agreed with Hunt that an attack on Syria was a terrible idea. “In Syria now our enemies are killing each other,” he said. “We should let them continue.” Peters was referring to the Assad regime and the most powerful rebel elements linked with al Qaeda. Forces loyal to the United States and Israel are by far the weakest element in the rebel matrix.

What this means is the logic for a US military attack would be to bolster that losing, non al Qaeda element, and, we must presume, hope for the best as far as who might be able to take over once we prevail — or, more likely, leave with egg all over our faces and with US power and respect diminished even more.

Those of us who have been saying that the US has become a weak, or at least more ordinary power among many in the world because of its military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of its economic decline, will have to recalibrate our analysis after watching the pathetic behavior of the leaders of Russia, Germany and France under pressure from the Obama administration not to allow Edward Snowden to gain asylum in those countries or even to escape his purgatory in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.

Last night, in an astonishing display of fawning obedience to the demands of US leaders, France and Germany first announced that they would not grant asylum to Snowden, despite broad popular support by French and German people for such an offer of aid to the embattled whistleblower. Then, France and Portugal abruptly refused to allow a Bolivian aircraft carrying the country’s president, Evo Morales, from a state visit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, to land for refueling in their countries, saying that they were concerned he might be flying Snowden to asylum in Bolivia.

Although Spain said eventually it would allow the Morales plane to refuel in the Canary Islands, it did not have enough fuel to get there and had to be diverted to Vienna, where, astonishingly, it was then searched like a drug-smuggling flight over Bolivian protests. Snowden was not aboard. A furious Morales immediately blamed the US Department of State for the whole incident — a charge that no one has disputed, though of course the US is refusing to comment.

Aircraft carrying national leaders have absolute diplomatic immunity under international law and moreover, Bolivia would have the absolute right to grant Snowden amnesty, and to bring him to its territory, whether or not he had a valid passport. As the leader of a sovereign nation, Morales has every right to carry anyone he wants on his plane with him back to his country.
Bolivian President Evo Morales, forced under US pressure to land in Vienna to have his returning plane searched for Snowden, calls the blocking of his flight from Russia to Bolivia a “kidnapping,” and “act of aggression” and an “offense against all the whole Latin region.”