By Lina Thorne

Today, 100 years after the first International Women's Day, women are STILL oppressed and subjugated, here in the US and around the world.

If you have to ask how women are oppressed here, look at the work of the U.S. Congress and many state legislatures to dismantle access to abortion, birth control, and even pap smears.

The United States is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, justifying them in part because they will bring "democracy" and better lives for the people, women especially. But US-backed policies in Afghanistan which have attempted to slightly undo decades of fundamentalist oppression are now being discarded.

The Washington Post quotes a US official talking about this: "The grim reality is that, despite all of the talk about promoting women's rights, things are going to have to give."

Human Rights Watch:

(Beirut) - The rights of Iraq's most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are routinely violated with impunity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch conducted research in seven cities across Iraq during 2010 and found that, beyond the country's continuing violence and crimes, human rights abuses are commonplace.

The 102-page report, "At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years After the US-led Invasion," calls on the government to protect the rights of vulnerable groups and to amend its penal code and all other laws that discriminate against women and violate freedom of speech. The report also urges Baghdad to open independent and impartial investigations into all allegations of abuse against detainees, minorities, and journalists.

By Debra Sweet

I’m listening to an MLK speech from 1967, where King says that the United States, at that point, had committed “more war crimes than almost any other nation.”

Add 44 years of invasions, CIA-engineered coups, and occupations, from Vietnam through Afghanistan.  Add the development of weapons and training for modern counter-insurgency — night vision, drones, depleted uranium, cluster bombs — means that an even higher percentage of civilians are dying and suffering in these aggressive wars the U.S. pursues.

People, it’s time to put political opposition to these wars back on the map, in a mass, visible, and determined way.

By Chris Floyd

For years, I have been writing about the American use of chemical weapons in the savage assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in late 2004. The results of this deployment of WMD began emerging a few months later.

The clear evidence of chemical weapons damage among the civilians of the city -- uncovered by Iraqi doctors working for the American-backed government -- was scorned and dismissed at that time, including by many stalwart anti-war voices, apparently frightened that such "extremist" charges would somehow detract from their own "reasonable" opposition -- perhaps even cost them their perches in the mainstream media.

By libbyliberal 

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