34 Articles

Wednesday, January 11, 2012
No Free Press in Iraq
A 2011 report by Human Rights Watch on Freedom of Expression in Iraq confirms this: "In 2010, Iraq remained one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a journalist. Extremists and unknown assailants continue to kill media workers and bomb their bureaus..."

Sunday, January 8, 2012
Iraq: A country in shambles
(1 comments) The state of the economy in Iraq is a disaster. Yet this irony is highlighted by the fact that Iraq has proven oil reserves third only behind Saudi Arabia and Iran -- hence one would expect it to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But nowhere is the lack of economic growth more evident than in Baghdad.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Gaza Flotilla Ship 'Sabotaged by Divers'
(2 comments) Israel insists the latest flotilla is a "dangerous provocation" and has vowed to intercept it. According to Tel Aviv daily Yedioth Aharonoth, military sources said participants of the flotilla were planning to pour chemicals, such as sulfur, on Israeli soldiers.

Thursday, January 20, 2011
Sick Gulf Residents Beg Officials for Help
(4 comments) NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, Jan 14, 2011 (IPS) - In an emotionally charged meeting this week sponsored by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, fishermen, Gulf residents and community leaders vented their increasingly grave concerns about the widespread health issues brought on by the three-month-long disaster.

Saturday, December 25, 2010
Rape rampant in US military
A Command Sergeant Major told Catherine Jayne West of the Mississippi National Guard, "There aren't but two places for women - in the kitchen or in the bedroom. Women have no place in the military."

Friday, December 24, 2010
Military sexual abuse 'staggering'
(1 comments) This is part two of Dahr Jamail's shocking investigation of rape and sexual abuse in the U.S. military.

Friday, November 19, 2010
Illness Plagues Gulf Residents in BP's Aftermath
(3 comments) Increasing numbers of U.S. Gulf Coast residents attribute ongoing sicknesses to BP's oil disaster and use of toxic dispersants. BP admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of Corexit dispersants - which have been banned in 19 countries - to sink the oil.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Fishermen Report Louisiana Bays Filled With Oil
"We know what oil is," Dean Blanchard of Dean Blanchard Seafood Inc., said. "The Coast Guard should change the color of their uniforms, since they are working for BP. We've known they are working for BP from the beginning of this thing. None of us believe anything they say about this oil disaster anymore."

Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Evidence Mounts of BP Spraying Toxic Dispersants
(8 comments) The Tillmans, focus of this article, and thousands of other fishermen and residents along the Gulf of Mexico are deeply concerned about local, state and federal government complicity with BP in what they see as a massive cover-up of the oil disaster by using toxic dispersants to sink any and all oil that is located. Not only have dispersants been used after BP said it stopped, but in places where they swore they wouldn't.

Monday, September 6, 2010
Pondering Derrick Jensen/Life vs. Productivity: "What Would You Live and Die to Protect?"
(2 comments) Pointed questions like that in the title come from a man named Derrick Jensen. They provide a lens through which to view the havoc that corporate capitalism is wreaking on our planet. They are meant to jolt us into the awareness that we are watching life on earth annihilated. They are also meant to challenge us into thinking about what form our resistance to this should take.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Despite "All Clear," Mississippi Sound Tests Positive for Oil
(4 comments) On August 19, Truthout accompanied two commercial fishermen from Mississippi on a trip into the Mississippi Sound to test for the presence of submerged oil. Laboratory test results from samples taken on that trip show EXTREMELY high concentrations of oil in the Mississippi Sound. Meanwhile, the State of Mississippi has declared its waters safe for commercial fishing and YOU, the consumer. Who are you going to believe?

Friday, August 27, 2010
Fish Kills Worry Gulf Scientists, Fishers, Environmentalists
(1 comments) "By our estimates there were thousands - and I'm talking about 5,000 to 15,000 - dead fish," St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro told reporters. "Different species were found dead, including crabs, sting rays, eel, drum, speckled trout, red fish, you name it, included in that kill."

Thursday, August 26, 2010
Widespread Fish Kills Worry Gulf Scientists, Fishers, Environmentalists
(2 comments) OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi, U.S., Aug 26, 2010 (IPS) - Another massive fish kill, this time in Louisiana, has alarmed scientists, fishers and environmentalists who believe they are caused by oil and dispersants.

Sunday, August 22, 2010
Destruction along the Gulf. How Has it Come to This?
(11 comments) The scenes Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld describe and photograph in this, their latest investigative report on the Great Gulf Oil Disaster could easily represent scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie. The trouble is, they are real, all too real and growing.

Monday, August 16, 2010
Uncovering the Lies That Are Sinking the Oil
(3 comments) The rampant use of toxic dispersents, out-of-state private contractors brought in to spray them and US Coast Guard complicity are common stories now in the 4 states most affected by BP's Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Commercial and charter fishermen, residents and members of BP's VOO program in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have spoken with Truthout about their witnessing all of these incidents.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Gulf Coast Fishermen Challenge US Government Over Dispersants
Kathy Birren, a spokesperson for commercial fishermen in Florida, said, "They are letting the person who committed the crime clean up the crime scene...It is time that government step up and protect us, our Gulf and the American public from further and possibly irreversible harm."

Monday, August 9, 2010
Out of Sight, Out of Mind (Even when it's not out of sight)
(2 comments) The lives of Gulf coast fishermen and residents are being destroyed. Scientists, environmentalists, and toxicologists are describing the Gulf of Mexico as a growing dead zone, a kill zone, and an energy sacrifice zone. As you read this, oil is everywhere around southeastern Louisiana, and continually washing ashore in Alabama and Mississippi.

Sunday, August 8, 2010
Chernobyl Then, the Gulf Now: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
(5 comments) We are witnessing an incredibly powerful propaganda campaign from the US Gov't which, clearly acting in BP's best interests, announced, via compliant media like the New York Times that "three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated -- and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm".

Thursday, August 5, 2010
Gulf Residents Likely Face Decades of Psychological Impact From BP's Oil Disaster
According to Dr. Anthony Ladd, a professor of sociology at Loyola University, "The key, long-term solution is for the US to wean itself from the oil-based economy--look down the road and start to transition to a clean, renewable alternative energy economy, that we should have started 20 years ago. Lack of knowledge is not the problem, it's lack of political will."

Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Scientists Deeply Concerned About BP Disaster's Long-Term Impact
(1 comments) While scientists have found very large plumes of dispersed oil at depth, "I'm not sure that oil will ever get here as dispersed clouds. It's getting here as sunken clouds, because that's what they [BP] wanted it to do. Sink it, get it out of sight out of mind," Dr. Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, said.

Monday, July 19, 2010
BP's Scheme to Swindle the "Small People"
(1 comments) Gulf Coast fishermen and others with lost income claims against British Petroleum (BP) are outraged by a recent announcement that the $20 billion government-administered claim fund will subtract money they earn by working on the cleanup effort from any future damage claims against BP.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Mitigating Annihilation
(1 comments) The more we see of this so-called cleanup and containment plan of BP's, the more it appears to be the second largest contributing factor in destroying the ecology and culture of the Gulf region, behind, of course, BP's oil volcano at the floor of the Gulf.

Friday, June 4, 2010
PTSD Soldier Punished by Army
"The way things are set up right now in the military is that if a soldier gets a chance to go to mental health, which is something military commanders tend to try to prevent from happening in the first place, but if soldiers go, psychologists and psychiatrists address and diagnose their PTSD and write it up, but this does not mean that they will get treatment," Iraq war veteran Eric Jasinski said.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010
US Navy Veterans Continue to Seek Justice for Israeli Attack
(1 comments) Meadors said he and his group, the USS Liberty Veterans Association, believe that Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, the Sixth Fleet carrier division commander at the time of the attack, was following orders from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who called off the Navy's rescue mission for the USS Liberty.

Saturday, May 22, 2010
Trucking Toward Climate Change
(1 comments) The tar sands mining project in Alberta, Canada, is possibly the largest industrial project in human history and critics claim it could also be the most destructive. The mining procedure for extracting oil from a region referred to as the "tar sands," located north of Edmonton, releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production procedures.

Sunday, May 16, 2010
Arizona's War on Immigrants
(5 comments) "A disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants has been established with the adoption of an immigration law that may allow for police action targeting individuals on the basis of their perceived ethnic origin," the experts said.

Thursday, April 8, 2010
Iraq War Vet: "We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us"
(2 comments) What is happening in Iraq seems to reflect what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls "atrocity-producing situations." He used this term first in his book "The Nazi Doctors." In 2004, he wrote an article for The Nation, applying his insights to the Iraq War and occupation.

Thursday, March 18, 2010
Operation Enduring Occupation
According to Professor Zoltan Grossman of The Evergreen State College, who has been researching military bases and participating in the global network against foreign bases for several years, the US has no intention of releasing control of its bases in Iraq.

Thursday, February 25, 2010
US Using Iraqi Political Discord to Justify Continuance of Occupation
The elections have been seen as a pivotal point for the Obama administration, with the expectation that they would bring more political stability to Iraq, further enabling a US withdrawal. it would be delusional to say that the magical solution to Iraq's predicament resides in the elections, since quite the contrary, these elections could open the gates of hell.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Soldiers Are Being Forced to Choose Between Their Children And the Military, And They're Paying the Price In Jailtime
(3 comments) The Army put Hutchinson in the position of having to choose between caring for her infant son or deploying to Afghanistan. She chose to care for her son, and is paying the price. The lower command gets subtle pressure for them to stop [losing personnel], and ultimately people become disposable. And not just the soldier, but their kids, or their mother, father, sister, or infant."

Monday, December 14, 2009
Veterans Group Calls On Soldiers to Refuse Orders to Deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq
(2 comments) In response to President Barack Obama's announcement on December 1 to deploy 30,000 additional troops to the occupation of Afghanistan, the organization March Forward!, comprising both veterans and active-duty members of the US military, has called on all soldiers to refuse their orders to deploy.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
U.S. Army Underreporting Suicides, Says GI Advocacy Group
(1 comments) The suicide rate for the Army for 2008 was calculated roughly at 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, which for the first time since the Vietnam War is higher than the adjusted civilian rate. Thus far, 2009 is on pace to set another record for the number of suicides in the Army.

Sunday, November 15, 2009
Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan
(3 comments) Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas. Hutchinson is confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia. Her son was placed into a county foster care system.

Thursday, November 5, 2009
Award-winning Journalist Dahr Jamail Analyzes Military Shooting, Interviews Soldiers Inside Ft. Hood
(11 comments) spoke with an Army Specialist who is an active-duty Iraq war veteran currently stationed at the base. The ...soldier spoke on condition of anonymity since the base is now on “lockdown,” and all “non-authorized” military personnel on the base have been ordered not to speak to the pres