Debra Sweet | June 2, 2023
We appreciate the comments of those of you who responded to last week’s “assignment” after reading the remarkable Brown University report: How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health. Thank you for putting your thoughts and insights together, and we will be sharing. If you haven’t read this report, please save it and do so. The imperialists in charge won’t learn any lessons from the 4.5 M lives lost in 20 years of the global war of terror. But we should.
I thought of this when I fully took in the fact that the G7 meeting last week was held in Hiroshima, giving Biden the opportunity to lay a wreath and say some pat BS at the memorial for the hundreds of thousands of lives taken so that the U.S. could gain 8 decades of domination. This was a meeting of global gangsters to plan new aggression against Russia and China. Continuing his pattern of at first saying “no” to more and more weapons for Ukraine, and then appearing to accede to “pressure,” Biden has given the go-ahead for Ukraine having F-16 jet fighters, the supersonic imperialist weapon that could provoke the nuclear exchange that humanity dreads.
Wednesday June 7: Global Protests Demand CLOSE GUANTANAMO Now
Join us in London, Mexico City, NYC, Washington DC, Minneapolis and Cobleskill NY. We demand the release of the remaining 16 prisoners “cleared” for release! I’ll be protesting in NYC and hope you will join us wherever you can. If you need help organizing, we’re here.
Andy Worthington writes about the other 14 prisoners in Guantanamo in The Broken Old Men of Guantanamo. This major article examines the cases of the 14 men still held at Guantánamo — “high-value detainees” and torture victims — who have not been approved for release, and what the U.S. authorities can and should do with them given that many have significant physical and/or mental health problems relating to their torture or to the inadequacy of medical care at the prison. Following recent, highly critical reports by the UN and the ICRC, he looks at the possibility of plea deals to resolve the deadlock in the trials of those who have been charged, and who may end up remaining at Guantánamo, but in a new facility providing “rehabilitation from torture, and adequate medical care” and also suggests that other men not charged may also have to be provided with a similar, but non-penal, facility providing the same level of care.
Lyle Rubin, who has made such strong impressions on students speaking to them with We Are Not Your Soldiers, has written a well-researched, challenging piece we want you all to read. He writes from the experience of having been a Marine, about Daniel Perry, the former Marine who spent minutes choking Jordan Neely to death on a New York City subway May 1: A Few Good Men: Jordan Neely’s killer and the racist violence at the heart of the American imperial project.
You can see Lyle, representing We Are Not Your Soldiers, in this video of the panel discussion on “Green Card Soldiers” a few weeks ago in May.
The Kissinger Century
World Can’t Wait held a number of large and memorable protests on Henry Kissinger, now a century old, as a war criminal for his actions in Vietnam, Chile and countless other countries, many of which are still unknown to the U.S. public. Do you have any other photos of those protests? Comments on Kissinger? Let us know.
