“The Chief of the Indian Army has stated that ‘Aazadi’, which means freedom, is not possible in Kashmir as long as his soldiers are stationed there. This means he has tacitly admitted the fact that the Indian Army is an instrument that keeps the population of Kashmir subjugated and unfree. An honest soldier has spoken.”

–Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Indian artist & writer

(Photo is Indian army chief General Bipin Rawat)

The US antiwar movement is not going to be right so long as it supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & only opposes US-coalition bombing. Misleaders of the corrupt movement have justified support for Syrian & Russian bombers by saying Assad invited Russian bombers to help him so they are not intervening illegally like the US-coalition. They also pioneered the twisted nationalist notion that the antiwar movement only opposes interventions by its own governments, not those of other countries. They forget that the anti-Vietnam War movement would not have been so powerful had it not been coordinated in hundreds of cities on every single continent. For these corrupt activists, it is all about the national sovereignty of a dictator; the cultist Jeff Mackler even calls it Assad’s right of self-determination when the concept of self-determination has never adhered to a dictator but only to an oppressed people. When Mackler, et al, endorse the sovereignty of a dictator against a popular uprising for democracy, they make theoretical asses of themselves. And not for the first time.

The antiwar movement is never going to be right so long as it is led by “retired” CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials like Coleen Rowley, Ray McGovern, Ann Wright. It is “retired” in quotes because McGovern openly admits they consult regularly with active duty CIA, FBI, & Pentagon officials. McGovern is making headlines in Russian media now because of his grandstanding display at the Gina Haspel hearings. It’s good that at the age of 78 McGovern has become opposed to CIA use of torture but it’s just not believable when he never spoke out against torture between 1963 & 1990 when he was a high-level operative in the CIA operating out of the White House. He can’t even try to play stupid about CIA torture in those years because CIA recruiters were being driven off US campuses by antiwar & human rights activists–especially after exposés in the 1970s that the CIA trained SAVAK, the Iranian secret service under the Shah of Iran, in the most unspeakable forms of torture including of children in front of their parents.

As for Rowley, it was in 2003, less than three years after she flagged my criminal record for using a WMD & after she was retired from the FBI, that she came out as a whistleblower opposed to the Iraq War. Today she posted an Islamophobic article by a screwball libertarian claiming John Bolton is an advocate of Islamic terrorism in the White House. That rancid idiocy is fully in accord with the US war on terror where the battle cry is nothing but the rise of Islamic terrorism.

Ann Wright is a retired US army colonel (29 years) & diplomat for the State Department (16 years) who operated in Grenada after the US invasion, Nicaragua, Somalia, Afghanistan, & in several US wars before her retirement in 2003 when she came out against the invasion of Iraq. She suddenly grew a repugnance to war at the age of 66 after serving in several brutal wars without question? She is a supporter of US politician Tulsi Gabbard, an Islamophobe who supports Modi, General Sisi in Egypt, & Assad. Wright just published an article in the Assadist rag Consortium News that Syria & Russia did not use chemical weapons in Douma but that the well-documented attacks were in fact carried out by unspecified armed militias. On what evidence does the hard-nosed military colonel make this claim? None, but a list of US “false flag” operations that she probably peddled during her military tenure. She may not stand with Bartlett & Beeley & the Kremlin in claiming the children filmed foaming at the mouth were crisis actors chosen from among kidnapped children but she still stands with the Assad dictatorship against the Syrian Arab Spring uprising.

How do McGovern, Rowley, & Wright serve US military interests despite their faux-whistleblowing & grandstanding? By confusing the hell out of what is going on & by fostering nihilism, the belief that nothing can be known, that everything–even that which is documented–is fake news & false flags. Nihilism cuts both ways: when Syria & Russia bomb civilians, it is just MSM fake news; when the US-coalition bombs civilians, it is only credible if it appears in state-owned alternative media like RT, Sputnik News, TeleSur because nothing “Zionist-controlled MSM” reports can be trusted. All three of them seek legitimacy in Palestinian solidarity when in over four decades of service to the US government, none of them uttered a peep about Palestinians. Mostly, these reprobate functionaries of the US military serve by misleading the US antiwar movement into being an appendage of Assad & Putin, by legitimizing Islamophobia, & by fomenting anti-Semitism rather than educating about Zionism.

The principled antiwar movement that must be built will have no place for the likes of these characters. It will be a day of good riddance to them.

(Photo is Rowley on left, Wright in middle, McGovern on right)

-a poem (my mode of resistance)
my mode of resistance is silence.
silence, silence and silence.
far i know silence lies
on the opposite lane of
revolutions.
so , in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to count.
count, count and count.
far i know count will
include
dead and
martyred children of
revolutions.
so, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to escape.
escape, escape and escape.
to high mountains and deep valleys.
for i know high mountains and
deep valleys are
all occupied by the tyrants.
So, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to pray.
pray, pray and pray.
for I know
God will never help,
God helps those
who help themselves.
so, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to write.
write, write and write.
for I know
they will never understand
my poetry.
So, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to educate.
educate, educate and educate
for I know
my tyrant is snared
in the sewer of baser minds.
Evil lunatic is its king.
hate and killing is the objective
so, in all probability,
my mode of resistance is to educate
educate, educate and educate.

–Zafar Iqbal

“It is reported that the person who recorded the deliberate mowing down of a young boy by the police truck has been arrested. If the reports are confirmed it won’t be a surprise. The driver who committed this atrocious crime will soon be rewarded, perhaps with cash, promotion and even a gallantry award! That is what is expected. Justice will remain elusive in kashmir as long as the occupation persists. Meanwhile the brigade of “kashmiri killing kashmiri” is in deep coma, may they never come out of it.”

–Mir Laieeq

There are enough reputable exposés of Assad propagandists Bartlett & Beeley for their guppies to start questioning their narratives about Syria–if the arrant Islamophobia & anti-Semitism didn’t already disquiet them. But wouldn’t you think Bartlett & Beeley’s support for Duterte’s vigilante death squad war against the poor & their emphatic support for the Rohingya genocide would give some pause? The fact that they haven’t tells us who these guppies are politically. Basically, they are detritus from the US war on terror & in that regard are not just politically worthless but concerning Syria they have proven to be poison.

Rohingya refugee kids at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh: one can see from the quality of life in makeshift tents that international refugee aid is pouring into the Rohingya community with the largesse of an eyedropper. It is not just a matter of extreme physical distress but a health & a mental wellbeing issue that refugees be provided with proper shelter. Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina presides over a sweatshop economy involving child labor so left to her own devices little will change for the refugees. But part of that sweatshop economy is the exponential growth of millionaires & billionaires sucking off the labor of children. Hasina can cry poor mouth till the cows come home but her government has the resources to provide decent shelter for refugees, especially if Bangladesh publicly demands other governments provide, & not just pledge, aid.

(Photo by Shafiur Rahman)

47 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers since the beginning of the Great Return March on March 30th.

5 of them are children under the age of 18.

8,536 others have been injured. Dozens have been disabled for life.

Not a single Israeli has been injured.

(Photo from Muhammad Smiry on Twitter)

Maung Zarni, Burmese dissident in exile, on the UN Security Council that recently sat down with the Burmese generals to discuss how to force “Bengalis” (the UNSC did not refer to them by their proper name of Rohingya in deference to the genocidaires) back to concentration camps in Arakan state:

“Hey, world, it’s way past time for official funeral of the Security Council. It is as dead as a corpse or a mummy. The glorified corpse in the midst of never-ending wars & genocides. Rohingya, Syria, Myanmar & a long list of its irreversible failures.”

(Photo of mummy attached to post. Apologies to the mummy for comparison to the stinking corpse of the UNSC.)

From a human rights perspective, it really doesn’t matter if Gina Haspel is passed as CIA head or not. There is no lesser evil here. If her psychopathic ass isn’t made torturer-in-chief, some other psychopath will be. The entire agency has to be dismantled.

Is this what the Mueller investigation has come down to? Stormy Daniels & all Trump’s other one night stands? Isn’t her 15 minutes of fame up yet? Is it just my misperception or does it appear they’re trying to normalize the Trump regime?