In 2018, the US military is conducting ‘counterterrorism’ operations in 76 countries (about 39-percent of the world’s nations). These operations are accompanied by violations of human rights, including torture, & civil liberties in those 76 countries & in the US.

Now can supporters of US humanitarian bombing against dictators explain to us again where they see the humanitarian potential in the US Pentagon? We’d really like to understand such cognitive dissonance.

Photo is bombing site in Syria.

(Photo from New Yorker)

The US has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that killed at least 507,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan, & Pakistan since the 9/11 attacks of 2001. That does not include indirect deaths caused by bombing such as loss of food, water, health facilities, electricity. Nor does it include fatalities for Syria, Yemen, Libya, or US support for Israeli bombing & occupation of Palestinians. Since the Pentagon does not make an accounting of civilian deaths in any of its wars–it’s hard to do so when war planes are dropping thousands of bombs indiscriminately & quite frankly, the Pentagon doesn’t give a damn–these figures are approximations & are considered quite conservative. Of course, there is also no honest accounting of US soldiers killed.

Shall we talk about humanitarian US interventions now?

Photo is US Marines at an undisclosed location in Syria on September 10th.

(Photo by Gabino Perez/US Marine Corps/Defense Department)

A new clinic in downtown Srinagar which will provide excellent doctors for consultation & subsidized medicine to the general public & free consultations & medicine to the poor. The Kashmiris who set up this clinic were disturbed to see people discontinue life-saving medicines & parents or grandparents give priority to food over medical care for their children because they were not affordable.

–information via Imtiaz R Chasti

Excellent interview with Rohingya activist Ro Nay San Lwin on deportation of Rohingya refugees back to killing fields of Burma:

https://www.france24.com/en/video/20181117-rohingya-crisis-cycle-violence-has-been-repeating-1978?

“The activist women who form the Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons (APDP) keep public attention focused on the 8,000 to 10,000 Kashmiri men disappeared by the Indian government forces since 1989. Surrounded by Indian troops, international photojournalists, & curious onlookers, the APDP activists cry, lament, & sing while holding photos & files documenting the lives of their disappeared loved ones. In this radical departure from traditionally private rituals of mourning, they create a spectacle of mourning that combats the government’s threatening silence about the fates of their sons, husbands, ” fathers.

“Drawn from Ather Zia’s ten years of engagement with the APDP as an anthropologist & fellow Kashmiri activist, Resisting Disappearance follows mothers & “half-widows” as they step boldly into courts, military camps, & morgues in search of their disappeared kin. Through an amalgam of ethnography, poetry, & photography, Zia illuminates how dynamics of gender & trauma in Kashmir have been transformed in the face of South Asia’s longest-running conflict, providing profound insight into how Kashmiri women & men nurture a politics of resistance while facing increasing military violence under India.”

–a new book by Ather Zia available on Amazon

This is the true character of Israeli apartheid, genocide, & military occupation.

Stand with Palestinians through speak-outs, rallies, & by building BDS, the economic & cultural boycott of Israel.

The ubiquitous faces of death & grieving in occupied Kashmir:

Stand with Kashmiris in demanding “Go back, India, go back!”

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Kamran Yousuf)

Many times I get thanked for supporting the Kashmiri struggle. I’m the grateful one since it is an immense honor to support such a historic & monumental struggle. They’re on the front lines of struggle where I am living safe in a predatory country. More important, we’re in this together trying to make the world a decent place to live. Solidarity has no part of noblesse oblige; it’s a two-way street to a better world.

The Catholic Church is in an international maelstrom over accusations of priest sexual abuse. In the US, the top cardinal was forced to resign over allegations of decades of assaults on minors & seminarians. Now the US Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Baltimore last Monday were ordered by Pope Francis & the Vatican to delay taking action to address the crisis in the US.

Pope Francis is shamefully compromised with the Rohingya genocide, collusive with Israel against Palestinians (a Hail Mary at the apartheid wall does not constitute solidarity against genocide), & hasn’t done anything substantial to expose & hand over priests accused of sexual assault for prosecution. Outside of washing one refugee’s feet in a grandstanding media spectacle, he hasn’t done one thing to merit the respect of Catholic laity or anyone else. Consider the good he could do if he weren’t so wedded to state power. Catholics deserve better than him.

Photo is a perplexed Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, telling reporters that Pope Francis wants them to postpone action to address priests raping children. Maybe the pope & his minions in the Vatican ought to be prosecuted on several counts, including conspiring to protect rapists.

(Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Cruise missile emancipation: the US dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in the first nine months of 2018 than in any other of the 17 years it has been bombing there. The UN announced that the number of Afghan civilian casualties in the same period is higher than in any year since it started documenting civilian deaths in 2009. Will anyone still dare raise the obscene proposal for US humanitarian bombing in Syria?

US out of Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia.