Compared to about 20 other high-income countries, since around the mid-1970s the U.S. life expectancy has been slipping from about the middle, or median, to the lowest rungs of life expectancy. So the relative stagnation in life expectancy in the U.S. compared with other countries is directly related to the fact that death rates have also declined more slowly in the U.S.
Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the countryâs largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived.
The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin and the Islamic State controlled it. The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground and everything went dark. Witnesses say one bomb punched down five floors. A fire spread, and crucial equipment failed. The mighty flow of the Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise, and local authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. militaryâs âno-strike listâ of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on âcrazy reporting.â
âThe Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,â he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.
In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians. (...)
How weapons firms influence the Ukraine debate âExpertsâ from defense industry funded think tanks are flooding the media, pushing for more arms without disclosing their benefactors.
âTo be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles. â¦To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use,â argues Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic.
What neither Cohen, who also famously pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, nor The Atlantic acknowledge in the article is that most of the weapons Cohen mentions in the article â including long-range missiles, F-16s, and even F-35s â are made by funders of Cohenâs employer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
While this might seem like a glaring conflict of interest that, at the very least, should be disclosed in the article, a new Quincy Institute brief that I authored, âDefense Contractor Funded Think Tanks Dominate Ukraine Debate,â shows that this article isnât an exception; itâs the norm. Americaâs top foreign policy think tanks are awash in funding from the defense industry. Theyâve dominated the media market related to the Ukraine war, and they seldom, if ever, disclose that many of the weapons theyâre recommending the U.S. give to Ukraine are made by their funders.
(...) The attitude of the corporate media, Congress, and the White House has traditionally been and continues to be that the U.S. stance in the world can be: do as we say, not as we do. So, the USA is good at pointing fingers at Russia or countries that invade some other nation, but when the U.S. does it, itâs another thing entirely. Such dynamics, while pernicious, especially among a nuclear-armed set of nations, are reflexes people in power have had for a long time.
More than a century ago, William Dean Howells wrote a short story called âEditha.â Keep in mind that this was after the United States had been slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. In it, a character says, âWhat a thing it is to have a country that canât be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!â
Now, here we are in 2023 and itâs not that different, except when it comes to the scale of communications, of a media thatâs so much more pervasive. If you read the op-ed pages and editorial sections of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of the liberal media, youâll find such doublethink well in place. Vladimir Putin, of course, is a war criminal. Well, I happen to think he is a war criminal. I also happen to think that George W. Bush is a war criminal, and we could go on to all too many other examples of high U.S. government officials where that description applies no less than to Vladimir Putin.
Can you find a single major newspaper thatâs been willing to editorialize that George W. Bush â having ordered the invasion of Iraq, costing hundreds of thousands of lives based on a set of lies â was a war criminal? It just ainât gonna happen. In fact, one of the things I was particularly pleased (in a grim sort of way) to explore in my book was the rehabilitation of that war criminal, providing a paradigm for the presidents who followed him and letting them off the hook, too.
I quote, for instance, President Obama speaking to troops in Afghanistan. You could take one sentence after another from his speeches there and find almost identical ones that President Lyndon Johnson used in speaking to American troops in Vietnam in 1966. They both talked about how U.S. soldiers were so compassionate, cared so much about human life, and were trying to help the suffering people of Vietnam or Afghanistan. That pernicious theme seems to accompany almost any U.S. war: that, with the best of intentions, the U.S. is seeking to help those in other countries. Itâs a way of making the victims at the other end of U.S. firepower â to use a word from my book title â invisible.
This is something I was able to do some thinking and writing about in my book. There are two tiers of grief in our media and our politics from Congress to the White House â ours and theirs. Our grief (including that of honorary semi-Americans like the Ukrainians) is focused on those who are killed by official enemy governments of the United States. Thatâs the real tier of grief and so when the media covers, as it should, the suffering of people in Ukraine thanks to Russiaâs war of aggression, their suffering is made as real as can be. And yet, when itâs the U.S. slaughtering people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, thatâs something else entirely. When it comes to the people at the other end of U.S. weaponry, the civilians, hundreds of thousands of them directly slaughtered, and millions indirectly killed by U.S. warfare, their tier of grief isnât, with rare exceptions, on the media map. Those human beings just donât matter.
Here in the USA, people find this unpleasant to hear or even think about. (...)
I certainly would not want to justify or provide an economic and strategic rationale for US military interventions and atrocities in Vietnam and neighbouring countries but for perspective, the majority of the carnage was committed by non-Americans. On top of that, the USA had the cover of the Cold War meaning that the communist threat was, correctly or incorrectly, perceived as an existential threat.
The Killing Fields (Khmer: áá¶ááá·áá¶á, Khmer pronunciation: <ÊiÉl pikÊ°iÉt>) are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than one million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime (the Communist Party of Kampuchea) during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970â1975). The mass killings were part of a broad state-sponsored genocide (the Cambodian genocide).
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The term genocide is usually misapplied when ethnic cleansing or extirpation would be far more accurate. This might be one of those rare exceptions where the term 'genocide' truly does apply.
Kissingerâs Killing Fields Interviews with more than 75 witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks and an exclusive archive of documents show that Henry Kissinger is responsible for even more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known.
The Demonization of Homeless People Is Killing Homeless People Homeless people in the United States are far more likely to be victims of gruesome violence than to be perpetrators. Yet the widespread demonization of the homeless would lead you to believe the exact opposite.
To any normal human being, the whole incident was a sad and wretched microcosm of everything thatâs gone wrong in modern American life: from the callous failures of political leadership and the rippling tragedies of endemic poverty, to the deep-seated need among lost young American men to find meaning in violent heroics.
Nearly two years after the U.S. killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, in a drone strike that prompted a rare apology from the Pentagon, the U.S. government has yet to make good on a pledge to compensate surviving relatives.
Sorry, there are other countries that need "saving."
Yeah. I love all the lose talk about getting the Russians to pay compensation or reparations for Ukraine....
Nearly two years after the U.S. killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, in a drone strike that prompted a rare apology from the Pentagon, the U.S. government has yet to make good on a pledge to compensate surviving relatives.
Sorry, there are other countries that need "saving."
US military officials are walking back claims that a drone strike Central Command (CENTCOM) launched on May 3 in northwest Syria killed a senior al-Qaeda leader after evidence emerged that a civilian was killed.
When the strike was first launched in Syriaâs northwest Idlib province, reports immediately emerged that the strike killed a sheep herder with no ties to any militant groups. The Associated Pressspoke with family members and neighbors of the victim, Lotfi Hassan Misto, who insisted he was innocent.
According to The Washington Post, Misto was a 56-year-old father of 10, and the paper spoke with terrorism experts who said it was unlikely he was affiliated with al-Qaeda.
âWe are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,â an unnamed military official told the Post. Another official claimed the person they killed was al-Qaeda but offered no evidence. âThough we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda,â the official said.
CENTCOMâs initial press release on the strike did not name the person they killed. Since then, the command has refused to share any details of the operation or say why they could have targeted the wrong person.
The US military is notorious for undercounting civilian casualties or lying about them. The Pentagon is also known for investigating itself and finding no wrongdoing, even in instances of significant civilian deaths, such as the August 2021 Kabul drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children.
Yes, we must see things from the Russian perspective. We must be sympathetic to their fear of being surrounded by hostile countries.
But we absolutely must not see things from the perspectives of those countries—from the Polish, Baltic, Czech, German, Swedish, Finnish perspective. We must not examine why they are hostile to an aggressive imperialist neighbor who openly threatens to invade and re-subjugate them.
