by Stephen Lendman  

NATO's alleged "responsibility to protect" was subterfuge. Months of terror bombings left Libya a charnel house.

Africa's most developed country was ravaged. Tens of thousands were killed, multiples more injured, and millions left on their own sink or swim.

When is war not war? It's when mass killing and destruction are called the right thing. It's also when terrorizing and traumatizing an entire population goes unaddressed.

by Andy Worthington 

In the long struggle to close Guantánamo, protests took place in Washington D.C. and across America on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11, and the newly established “Close Guantánamo” campaign (of which I am a member of the steering committee) launched a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website, calling on President Obama to fulfill his promise to close the prison, which he made when he took office three years ago, and pointing out how fundamentally unjust it is that 89 of the remaining 171 prisoners have been cleared for release, and yet are still held.

That petition needs to secure 25,000 signatures by February 6, to oblige the President to respond, and at the time of writing, over 4,300 people had signed it. Many groups have been asking their supporters to sign it, and yesterday the Center for Constitutional Rights publicly added their voice to the campaign, sending out an email alert to all their supporters, asking them to sign the petition, and also asking visitors to the “Close Guantánamo” page on their website to sign it.

by Michelle Williams

In Amherst Massachusetts, tucked away on Main Street, an art installation shared the stories of people over 1400 miles away, in Guantánamo Bay.

The exhibit titled, “Guantánamo: Ten Years and Counting,” features the artwork, poetry, photos and stories of prisoners in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp though two-dimensional panels, clips of documentaries and a life-size mannequin wearing the standard issued orange jumpsuit that prisoners wear, with a black sack on its head.

This month marks the 10th year the detention camp has held detainees.

Beginning at the left side of the gallery, the first panel highlights a phrase U.S Military Intelligence Officers said to Hadj Boudella, a former detainee of Guantánamo, “You are in a place where there is no law – we are the law.”

by Pamela Merritt

A task force in North Carolina recently ruled that survivors of that state’s eugenics program should be paid $50,000 each in financial compensation. Eugenics is often defined as the science of “improving” a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of “desirable” heritable characteristics.

The practice of eugenics was not limited to Nazi Germany nor is it a well kept secret that’s been waiting to be discovered by organizations opposed to reproductive justice.

In America, state governments set up eugenics boards that determined the reproductive future of thousands. I grew up listening to my maternal Grandmother, a Mississippi native, warn against trusting doctors and passing along lessons she learned from other poor women of color who went into a hospital to give birth only to later find out that they were given a Mississippi Appendectomy without their consent.

By David Swanson

In the news around the world and even in the United States on Tuesday was the anger among Iraqis at the failure of the United States to hold anyone seriously accountable for the 2005 massacre in Haditha.  The story was a useful reminder of how the operations of the U.S. military over the past decade have fueled hostility toward our nation.

President Obama began his State of the Union speech Tuesday night by absurdly claiming the exact opposite, asserting that the war on Iraq has made us safer and -- I kid you not -- "more respected around the world."  He later equated the war on Iraq to World War II, a surefire way to put anything beyond criticism in the United States, provided you can get people to fall for it.

Remember, this is the guy who won the Democratic Primary in 2008 by the simple fact of having not yet been in the Senate in 2003 and thus having avoided voting for the war that he funded to the hilt as a senator beginning in 2005.  He had called it a dumb war.  Now he says it made us safer.  If it was dumb, was he dumber?  What is he trying to say?

In the next breath, Obama says "some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home."  Never mind that there are three times as many U.S. troops in Afghanistan now as when Obama moved into the White House.  The myth is that he's ending wars.