Learn about antiwar.com

[Silver]

Every man and woman under covenant should seek peace, not war. US interventionism is clearly a sin. Get educated.

https://www.antiwar.com/who.php

About Us

MISSION

This site is devoted to the cause of non-interventionism and is read by libertarians, pacifists, leftists, "greens," and independents alike, as well as many on the Right who agree with our opposition to imperialism. Our initial project was to fight against intervention in the Balkans under the Clinton presidency. We applied the same principles to Clinton's campaigns in Haiti and Kosovo and bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan. Our politics are libertarian: our opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne's concept that "War is the health of the State." With every war, America has made a "great leap" into statism, and as Bourne emphasized, "it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution [the State]." At its core, that nature includes an ever increasing threat to individual liberty and the centralization of political power.

Antiwar.com is one project of our parent foundation, the Randolph Bourne Institute. It is a program that provides a sounding board of interest to all who are concerned about U.S. foreign policy and its implications.

In 1952, Garet Garrett, one of the last of the Old Right "isolationists," said it well:

"Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other."

This is the perception that informs our activism and inspires our dedication. Non-interventionism abroad is a corollary to non-interventionism at home. Randolph Bourne echoed this sentiment: "We cannot crusade against war without implicitly crusading against the State." Since opposition to war is at the heart of our philosophy, and single-issue politics is the only avenue open to us, Antiwar.com embodies the politics of the possible.

Our dedication to libertarian principles, inspired in large part by the works and example of the late Murray N. Rothbard, is reflected on this site. While openly acknowledging that we have an agenda, the editors take seriously our purely journalistic mission, which is to get past the media filters and reveal the truth about America's foreign policy. Citing a wide variety of sources without fear or favor, and presenting our own views in the regular columns of various contributors, we clearly differentiate between fact and opinion, and let our readers know which is which.

The pressing need for "citizen experts" is the reason we set up Antiwar.com. In this process, the site evolved very quickly into an online magazine and research tool designed to keep the American people and the world informed about the overseas plans of the American government. The history of our site and of American foreign policy demonstrates the demand for such experts.

The founders of Antiwar.com were active in the Libertarian Party during the 1970s; in 1983, we founded the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee to work as a libertarian caucus within the GOP. Today, we are seeking to challenge the traditional politics of "Left" and "Right." At present, none of the existing parties or activist groups offer an effective vehicle for principled libertarian politics. Yet even in the absence of a party of liberty, we cannot abstain from the struggle. We strive to lead the non-interventionist cause and the peace movements that many respected institutions have forgotten.

Forged in the experience of the first Balkan war, Antiwar.com has become the Internet newspaper of record for a growing international movement, the central locus of opposition to a new imperialism that masks its ambitions in the rhetoric of "human rights," "humanitarianism," "freedom from terror," and "global democracy." The totalitarian liberals and social democrats of the West have unilaterally and arrogantly abolished national sovereignty and openly seek to overthrow all who would oppose their bid for global hegemony. They have made enemies of the patriots of all countries, and it is time for those enemies to unite – or perish alone.

Antiwar.com represents the truly pro-America side of the foreign policy debate. With our focus on a less centralized government and freedom at home, we consider ourselves the real American patriots. "America first!" regards the traditions of a republican government and non-interventionism as paramount to freedom – a concept that helped forge the foundation of this nation.

THE FUTURE
Antiwar.com is already fighting the next information war: we are dedicated to the proposition that war hawks and our leaders are not going to be allowed to get away with it unopposed and unchallenged. The War Party is well-organized, well-financed, and very focused. They know what they want: a renewal of the Cold War, increased military spending, and a globalist mission that would project American power from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula and all points in between. And they know how to get it: mobilizing special interest groups and key corporate allies in a propaganda war designed to win the hearts if not the minds of the American people. The antiwar forces, on the other hand, are not so well-positioned. Everyone is for peace, in theory at least, but there is no one group of Americans especially disposed to work for it, outside of small religious groups such as the Quakers and the Catholic Worker movement.

Lacking a centrally coordinated leadership, without financial resources of any significance, and incredibly diverse, the organized opposition to the first Balkan war was unfocused and of limited effectiveness. Currently, the antiwar movement against a war on Iraq is considered anti-American and left-wing. However, we are changing this perception by leading the cause of the patriotic peace movement, which understands the true costs of war. Unfortunately, the organizations pushing for actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other areas around the world are stronger and better focused. Antiwar.com has become an integral part of the movement against these groups and for peace by disseminating accurate news and commentary.

Antiwar.com is dedicated to building an awareness of the globalist and interventionist forces that would enslave us all in a New World Order on which the sun never sets. But we can't do it without you. Tell your friends about Antiwar.com, and also help us do our job by bringing items to our attention. We are always looking for material, and we welcome your suggestions, whether of links or in the form of original articles submitted to the editors.

Antiwar.com is a ward of the nonprofit Randolph Bourne Institute. Your contribution to Antiwar.com is tax-deductible. Your contributions, whether a one-time donation or a monthly pledge, will make the difference between success and failure. While the propaganda machine of the War Party is well-oiled with money, Antiwar.com carries on the fight with little in the way of resources – except the intellectual resources to bring the facts to light. But we can't do it without your material support. To find out how, just click on the secure credit card form at the bottom of this page. You can strike a blow against the War Party and cast your ballot for peace by making a contribution today.

[Silver]

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
~Alexis de Tocqueville

[Silver]

War’s a brain spattering windpipe splitting art.
~Lord Byron

[Silver]

How in the world can anyone, including the Muslim haters on LDSFF, justify the US military killing people in Yemen. How many times since the US became a country have the armed forces of Yemen attacked us?

http://news.antiwar.com/2017/08/06/majo ... ern-yemen/

Major US-Led Offensive Targets al-Qaeda Stronghold in Southern Yemen
Thousands of Fighters Converge on Shabwa Province
Jason Ditz Posted on August 6, 2017

Last week’s US-backed raid against what was described as an al-Qaeda position within Yemen’s Shabwa Province, in which officials claimed to have inflicted “heavy casualties,” appears to have actually marked the beginning of a much larger military campaign in the province.

With US troops now confirmed to be on the ground, working with UAE forces in leading the campaign, some 2,000 fighters, mostly UAE-hired mercenary fighters from the region, are massing for what is being called a “clearing operation.”

The goal of this operation appears to be an outright purge of the Shabwa Province of all fighters from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Such a campaign would likely be long and involve a lot of fighting, as AQAP has had a large presence around the area for several years.

The exact scope of the direct US military involvement is unclear, though the Pentagon confirmed Friday that US special forces are on the ground in the area in an advisory role, and suggested it was likely that more US troops would be deployed in the weeks to come.

[Silver]

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2017/08/06 ... hiroshima/

August 6: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima
Peter Van Buren Posted on August 6, 2017
There is a lot to say about this day, when 72 years ago, the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons.

So much is said every day about Iran and nuclear weapons, and terrorists and nuclear weapons, Putin with nuclear weapons and so forth, but that one fact remains among all the blather. For all the talk, only America has dropped the bomb.


We did it twice (the Nagasaki bomb was on August 9) and we did it on two civilian targets. There is no use arguing that the two cities had significant military value; if there had been, they would have already been firebombed to tinder the way Tokyo and other cities in Japan had been. Nagasaki was a port, but not far away was the major naval base at Sasebo, which some say was not bombed because the U.S. planned to take possession of it after the war for our own navy (we did.) Both cities had some defense industry, but pretty much any place in Japan larger than a village also did.

Civilians were not, in today’s language, collateral damage. They were the targets.

So we’ll leave it at this. As part of my research for my next book, Hooper’s War, I found this, below, an accounting by the United States of the exact, precise number of school children it killed on that hot August morning in 1945.

hiroshima-school-children-dead.jpg (45.29 KiB) Viewed 863 times

[Silver]

Six stories of grief. Six examples of corrupt power in Washington, DC. May our days of aggression and empire-building end soon.

6 stories.jpg (59.89 KiB) Viewed 856 times

https://www.antiwar.com/doverimages/page92.htm

[iWriteStuff]

Ever seen the documentary "White Light/Black Rain"? Man that was some sobering stuff there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17dcFaZSvok

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2017/08/06 ... hiroshima/

August 6: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima
Peter Van Buren Posted on August 6, 2017
There is a lot to say about this day, when 72 years ago, the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons.

So much is said every day about Iran and nuclear weapons, and terrorists and nuclear weapons, Putin with nuclear weapons and so forth, but that one fact remains among all the blather. For all the talk, only America has dropped the bomb.


We did it twice (the Nagasaki bomb was on August 9) and we did it on two civilian targets. There is no use arguing that the two cities had significant military value; if there had been, they would have already been firebombed to tinder the way Tokyo and other cities in Japan had been. Nagasaki was a port, but not far away was the major naval base at Sasebo, which some say was not bombed because the U.S. planned to take possession of it after the war for our own navy (we did.) Both cities had some defense industry, but pretty much any place in Japan larger than a village also did.

Civilians were not, in today’s language, collateral damage. They were the targets.

So we’ll leave it at this. As part of my research for my next book, Hooper’s War, I found this, below, an accounting by the United States of the exact, precise number of school children it killed on that hot August morning in 1945.

hiroshima-school-children-dead.jpg

[larsenb]

Good site. I've been following it for 20 years or so and have had a few email exchanges with Justin Raimondo, one of its founders. He''s used to operate out of Sunnyvale, CA, my old home town.

Justin's a good guy. Very good political analyst. He is an admitted homosexual, but doesn't support 'gay marriage', nor their current use of government to bludgeon everyone else to conform with their expectations.

Libertarian, paleo-Conservative background.

[Silver]

http://randolphbourne.org/

Randolph Bourne Institute

(publisher of Antiwar.com)

Randolph Bourne Portrait
Randolph Bourne
(portrait by Sésame Buckner)
Randolph Bourne, a notable American journalist, social critic, and political activist of the early 20th century, courageously opposed U.S. intervention in World War I. Read Jeff Riggenbach's biography of Bourne.

The Randolph Bourne Institute (RBI) seeks to honor Bourne's memory by promoting a noninterventionist foreign policy for the United States as the best way of fostering a peaceful, more prosperous world.

A nonprofit, tax-exempt, educational organization founded in 2001, the RBI centers its efforts around four major projects: a Web site, Antiwar.com; a fellows program for writers and researchers; a speakers program; and a student intern and campus outreach program. Every RBI project is designed for maximum inclusiveness, in the hope of enabling people from all points on the political spectrum – libertarian, left, right, and center – to join together on the vital issue of opposing war.

The Antiwar.com Web site, launched in December 1995, is the Institute's main project and the preeminent noninterventionist site on the Internet. It provides hourly coverage of breaking news, along with informed analysis of major world conflicts (with particular attention to the U.S. role in those conflicts) – something the establishment media utterly fails to offer. Toward this end, Antiwar.com relies on existing news sources as well as on its own columnists and reporters, many of whom file from within the various conflict areas covered on the site. Antiwar.com's target audience includes members of the media, college students, and other concerned individuals and organizations. Antiwar.com has been a project of the RBI for sixteen years and has grown steadily in that time, as has its following – whether measured by numbers of readers or by the site's demonstrated ability to affect the type and tenor of public debate about noninterventionism. Antiwar.com's growing influence has been analyzed and discussed on such national TV news programs as the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, in such magazines as Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The Nation, and in such popular alternative weeklies as the New York Press and the SF (San Francisco) Bay Guardian.

The RBI fellows program provides support for authors and researchers interested in the topic of nonintervention. Currently, the RBI boasts two particularly distinguished fellows. The editorial director of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, is also a senior fellow of the Randolph Bourne Institute. Raimondo's writings include Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993, reprinted 2008); Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996); An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (2000); The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (2003); and numerous articles for newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The American Conservative, and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Another RBI senior fellow is prominent journalist Jeff Riggenbach, author of In Praise of Decadence (1998), Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), and hundreds of articles in publications as diverse as USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Reason, and Inquiry.

The RBI speakers program has arranged for our fellows, our columnists, our staff members, and others to make informative and insightful presentations, primarily on U.S. interventionism, on college campuses and in other venues. We are actively seeking to expand in this area and to schedule more events in the future. If our readers have suggestions, we welcome them.

A student intern/campus outreach program was initiated in the summer of 2002, when the RBI's first two student interns worked on setting up the RBI campus outreach program and fielding assignments related to Antiwar.com, the RBI library project, and a series of face-to-face meetings between students and local experts on U.S. foreign policy (e.g., Hoover Institution scholars and Stanford and UC Berkeley students). We hope to expand the intern program to year-round in the near future.

[Silver]

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ ... mran-awan/

The Strange Case of Imran Awan
Only fraud or something more?
By PHILIP GIRALDI • August 3, 2017

On July 25, Pakistani-American IT specialist Imran Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport for bank fraud while he was allegedly fleeing to Pakistan. The reports predictably produced some press coverage before the story died. Yet the speed at which the news vanished has prompted some observers to suggest that there might actually be something more to the disappearance than the operation of the normal media-reporting cycle. A number of conservative websites, including Breitbart, have been sounding the alarm over a possible cover-up that just might even be linked to what we are now calling Russiagate.

To be sure, the tale is a strange one with plenty of unsavory links. Thirty-seven-year-old Awan, as well as his wife and two brothers Abid and Jamal, worked as IT administrators for nearly 30 congressmen, all Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. They did not have security clearances and it is not even certain that they were in any way checked out before being hired. At one point, they brought into the House as a colleague one Rao Abbas, someone to whom they owed money and who might have had no qualifications at all to work IT. Abbas wound up working in the office of Rep. Patrick Murphy, who was at the time a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as for Rep. Theo Deutch. He was paid $250,000.

The process of granting security clearances to Congressional staff is not exactly transparent, but it is not unlike clearances for other government agencies. The office seeking the clearance for a staff member must put in a request, some kind of investigation follows, and the applicant must sign a non-disclosure agreement before the authorization is granted. Sometimes Congress pushes the process by demanding that its staff have access above and beyond the normal “need to know.” In March 2016, for example, eight Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee requested that their staffs be given access to top-secret sensitive compartmented information (SCI). It is not known if the Awans, who were working for several committee members, would have been involved, but Buzzfeed, in its initial reporting on the investigation of the Awans family, repeated the concerns of a congressman that the suspects might have “had access to the House of Representatives’ entire computer network.”

The Awans billed Congress for more than $4 million between 2004 and 2016, a sum that has been reported to be three or four times higher than the norm for government contractor IT specialists performing similar work. The considerable level of overbilling has not been explained by the congressmen involved. In spite of all that income, Imran Awan declared bankruptcy in 2010, claiming losses of $1 million on a car business that he owned in Falls Church, Va. The business was named Cars International A, abbreviated on its business cards as CIA.

As of February 2016, the Awans came under suspicion for having set up an operation to steal and resell government-owned computer equipment. It was also believed that they had somehow obtained access to House of Representatives’ computer databases as well as to other information in the internal computer system that they were not normally authorized to work on as part of their duties. The Capitol Hill Police began an investigation and quietly alerted the congressmen involved that there might be a problem. Most stopped employing the Awan family, but Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran on the payroll until the day after he was actually arrested.

Some of those defending the Awans, to include Wasserman-Schultz and the family lawyer, have insisted that he and his family were the victims of “an anti-Muslim, right-wing smear job,” though there is no actual evidence to suggest that is the case. They also claim that the bank fraud, in which he obtained a home equity loan for $165,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union based on a house that he owned and claimed to live in in Lorton, Va., was largely a misunderstanding; it was described by his lawyer Chris Gowen, a Clinton family confidant, as something that was “extremely minor.” It turned out that there was a tenant in the house, an ex-Marine and his Naval officer wife, who were very suspicious about a large quantity of what appeared to be government-sourced computer equipment and supplies, all material that had been left behind by the Awans. They contacted the FBI, which discovered hard drives that appeared to have been deliberately destroyed.

The FBI is certainly interested in the theft of government computers. But it is also looking into the possibility that the Awans were using their ability to access and possibly exploit sensitive information stored in the House of Representatives’ computer network, as well as through Wasserman-Schultz’s iPad, which Imran had access to and connected to the Democratic National Committee server. As Imran Awan was also a dual-national, born in Pakistan, the possibility of espionage also had to be considered. The charge that Awan was actually arrested on, bank fraud, was an easy way to hold him, as that aspect of his activities was well documented. It allows the other more serious investigations to continue, so the argument that Imran Awan is only being held over a minor matter is not necessarily correct.

Awans wired the credit union money to Pakistan, as part of a $283,000 transfer that was made in January. His wife Hina Alvi also left the U.S. two months later. She was searched by Customs officers and it was determined that she was carrying $12,000 in cash. She also had with her their three children, and numerous boxes containing household goods and clothing. It was clear that she did not intend to come back, but there has been no explanation why she was even allowed to leave, since carrying more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it is a felony.

As Imran Awan reportedly had access to Wasserman-Schultz’s iPad, he presumably also had access to the incriminating Hillary Clinton emails. He also used a laptop in her office that was, according to investigators, concealed in an “unused crevice” in the Rayburn House Office Building. It is being examined by police but Wasserman-Schultz tried strenuously to recover it before it could be looked at. She pressured the Chief of the Capitol Police Matthew Verderosa to return it, threatening him by saying “you should expect that there will be consequences.”

There is another odd connection of Imran Awan that goes back to the circle around prominent neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz during the Iraq War. In late 2002 and early 2003, Wolfowitz regularly met secretly with a group of Iraqi expatriates who resided in the Washington area and were opponents of the Saddam Hussein regime. The Iraqis had not been in their country of birth for many years but they claimed to have regular contact with well-informed family members and political allies. The Iraqi advisers provided Wolfowitz with a now-familiar refrain, i.e. that the Iraqi people would rise up to support invading Americans and overthrow the hated Saddam. They would greet their liberators with bouquets of flowers and shouts of joy.

The Iraqis were headed by one Dr. Ali A. al-Attar, born in Baghdad to Iranian parents in 1963, a 1989 graduate of the American University of Beirut Faculty of Medicine. He subsequently emigrated to the United States and set up a practice in internal medicine in Greenbelt, Md., a suburb of Washington D.C. Al-Attar eventually expanded his business to include nine practices that he wholly or partly owned in Virginia and Maryland but he eventually lost his license due to “questionable billing practices” as well as “unprofessional conduct” due to having sex with patients.

Al-Attar was investigated by the FBI and eventually indicted for large scale health care fraud in 2008-09. This included charging insurance companies more than $2.3 million for services their patients did not actually receive, with many of the false claims using names of diplomats and employees enrolled in a group plan at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. In one case, the doctors claimed an embassy employee visited three of their clinics every 26 days between May 2007 and August 2008 to have the same testing done each time. The insurance company paid the doctors $55,000 for more than 400 nonexistent procedures for the one patient alone.

Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment and is now considered a fugitive from justice. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut, Lebanon, conversing with a Hezbollah official. Al-Attar is of interest in this case because he appears to have been a friend of Imran Awan and also loaned him $100,000, which was never repaid. The FBI is currently looking into any possible espionage involving the two men as Awan and his associates clearly had access to classified information while working in the House of Representatives.

The Imran Awan case is certainly of considerable interest not only for what the investigation eventually turns up but also for what it reveals about how things work in Congress. One might well ask how foreign-born IT specialists are selected and vetted prior to being significantly overpaid and allowed to work on computers in congressional offices. And the ability of those same individuals to keep working even after the relevant congressmen have been warned that their employee was under investigation has to be explained beyond Wasserman-Schultz’s comment that Awan had not committed any crime. And how does “bankrupt” Imran Awan wind up with a high-priced lawyer to defend him who is associated with the Clintons? Finally, there are the lingering concerns about the unfortunately well-established Russiagate narrative. Did the Russians really hack into the DNC, or was it some kind of inside job carried out by someone actually working for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for reasons that have yet to be determined, possibly to include espionage? There are many questions—and so far, few answers.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

[aspietroll]

It seems like antiwar combines parts of a wide spectrum of groups that like to think themselves anti establishment.

The thought of being against war has such a Divine feeling to it. It's a patriotic cause and uniting cause and nothing seems more gentlemanly or wise than a person against war.

I'll think of this as one of the last refuges of the Old Right which I identify with.