A crime: The United States, regardless of which party was in the White House, never signed on to the International Criminal Court, set up by many nations to hold individuals accountable for the “gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.”
Another crime: A president convicted of multiple crimes was elected by slightly less than half of U.S. voters in 2024; he immediately pardoned over 1400 supporters who engaged in a violent attempted coup, and recently and apparently seriously, proposes that the U.S. seize parts of sovereign nations: Greenland, Panama, Gaza. In the case of Palestine, he would force almost two million people out.
Crime on top of crime: Said president sanctions the International Criminal Court for issuing an arrest warrant for the leader of Israel, after 60,000++ people were killed by its military over 15 months. The fact that the ICC also issued warrants for Hamas leaders — all of whom have since been killed by Israel — is almost never mentioned by defenders of this genocide.
One can only surmise that this whole system is criminal. Those decent people — of whom there are billions — must act together to stop this systemic criminality.
STOP Deportations to Infamous Guantanamo Torture Camp!
(photo credit: Linda Novenski)
NYC February 5 outside the NYC Public Library
Next Global Vigils to Close Guantanamo NOW: Wednesday March 5
Trump has begun to send migrants rounded up since he took power to Guantanamo, a part of the nation of Cuba which the U.S. has controlled since seizing it in 1898. Echoing George Bush in 2001, Trump claims the migrants are “the worst of the worst.” To the MAGA fascists, all immigrants are criminals. To us they are fellow humans with rights. There’s a sordid history of U.S. detention at Guantanamo.
When a reactionary coup in Haiti overthrew Haiti’s president Aristide in 1991, thousands of Haitians fled into the ocean. Rather than providing refuge, the Clinton administration locked up thousands of them in Guantanamo, and then forced most of them back to Haiti. In the early 90’s, Cubans trying to leave Cuba during the “special period” of economic crisis there were also detained at the base.
Donald J Trump listed on War Criminals Watch, 2018
Learn more & take action at:
CloseGuantanamo.org | WorldCantWait.org | GSFund.org | WitnessAgainstTorture.come
The new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s impending war on immigrants, LGBT folks, leftists, people of color, anti-racists and DEI
Now that he’s running the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has been unleashed on the globe to do damage. “He sees himself and his fellow ‘true Christians’ as enlisted in a holy war against ‘domestic enemies’ he accuses of trying to take down God and country,” said Paul Street last month in Counterpunch.
This week, Hegseth assured Trump’s base that he could prepare the Guantanamo naval base for 30,000 “criminal” migrants. Hegseth was based at the prison during the worst of the CIA torture years, 2004-05. This week, he was in El Paso with “border Czar” Tom Homan. He promises “100% operational control” of the border though migrant entries have gone way down since last year.
Hegseth is barging ahead on Trump’s purge of “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), saying those initiatives have “weakened” the armed forces; that he wants to return a “Warrior ethos” and make, as VP Harris also said last summer, the U.S. military the “most lethal.” He embraces Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from serving in the military.
The New Yorker recently investigated the U.S. military’s shortfall in recruiting by as much as 25% below goal in recent years. The U.S. Military’s Recruiting Crisis shows all four branches scrambling to lower standards and extra basic training to put bodies into uniform. There is no suggestion in the article that “DEI” is a cause for this shortfall.
Did people not sign up because the military was too concerned with diversity? The New Yorker says, “When the Pentagon surveys young people about why they don’t want to enlist, only about five per cent list ‘wokeness’; far more are concerned about discrimination. The biggest reason that they give for not joining up is fear of death or injury, followed by worries about post-traumatic stress.