Articles

In his memoir Disloyal, Michael Cohen, the former attorney who was President Donald J. Trump's special counsel from 2017-2018, tells us that "like a crime boss, Trump wanted no evidence that could connect him to any of his deeds, or deeds that he indirectly or directly ordered other to do." Cohen testified that in his requests or orders, Trump "used inferences, nods, silences, euphemisms, signals" and kept staff around him...
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The twenty-seven prominent psychiatrists and mental health experts who contribute essays to the book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" edited by Bandy X. Lee, MD, MDIV, are fully aware of the prohibition called the "Goldwater rule" but seem to have found a way around it.

The "Goldwater rule," adopted by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, says, "It is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion [of a pe...
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To wish there were a law against war seems a pipe dream. But far from fantasy, it turns out there already is a law against war. Really. And it's still on the books. It's called the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris on August 27, 1928, on which the US Senate voted 85 to 1 in favor of ratifying (with nine senators not voting). 

Frank B. Kellogg was US Secretary of State from 1925-29 at the same time Aristide Briand was the foreign minister of France. The Pa...
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The best way to appreciate the men who regularly collect our garbage is to imagine what if they did not do their job.

We have a tragic example of this starting with the Gulf War in 1991. Those old enough might remember that during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the U.S. and its allies imposed severe economic sanctions on Iraq.

A 1996 article in Peace and Freedom, the magazine of the Women's Intrnational League for Peace & Freedom, tol...
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It all began in Taos, New Mexico, where my husband and I lived and where for months I had been noticing jets in the blue sky over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains leaving long trails of white exhaust behind them. I had never before seen a commercial or military jet spew out that much “smoke,” exhaust that lingered so long or that ran parallel to and crisscrossed other white trails in the sky. I wanted to find out what was going on. 

Googling...
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By charging a membership fee--no matter how small--the public library in Taos, New Mexico, tells the world what its community values and is willing to support or not. Learning the news sent me to my files, where I dusted off this piece published as an op-ed in the Gannett Newspapers on April 19, 1998, when I was a trustee of the Bedford Hills Free Library in New York before we moved to Taos. I feel the same way about free public libraries today:

When the boy nickna...
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To illustrate the complication of water, take the case of the El Valle de los Ranchos Water & Sanitation District (El Valle) vs. Jose Venito Martinez Acequia (JVM Acequia).

John Miera, Tom Trojnar, and John Hall are commissioners of the JVM Acequia in Taos, which gets its water from the Rio Fernando. All three use their allotment of water to irrigate mixed grasses to feed their horses and burros, and in two cases, sell any extra.

What...
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Mark Twain quipped, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” What would he think of two scientists from Harvard--David W. Keith, whose field is applied physics, and James G. Anderson, atmospheric chemistry--who want to explore the possibility of combating global warming by lowering the temperature of planet Earth?

But first, a little background. Addressing the issue of climate change, the U.S. House of Representatives...
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Both New Mexico Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall voted for two new laws that could detrimentally affect the quality of our lives--the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act  (NDAA) and the FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Reform Act of  2012 (“the FAA Act”). Congressman Ben Lujan wisely and courageously voted against them.

If it weren’t for the diligence of Not1MoreAcre! (N1MA!) we might be blindside...
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Peaceful Skies Coalition has learned that Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo is currently a candidate to train pilots of friendly foreign countries, as well as U.S. pilots, to fly the loud F-35 bomber. Other candidates are Air Guard Stations in Boise, Idaho, and Tucson, AZ, both connected to commercial airports, as well as Luke AF Base, also in AZ.

Why should this concern us? If Holloman wins the new mission, its current available practice air space is approxima...
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The Pentagon is disregarding its ban on military expansion in the top portion of the "51st State"--the beautiful 60 million acres in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico that the Army and Air Force want to turn into a practice war zone. 

As quoted on the Not 1 More Acre! Website, the organization “fostered an overwhelming (383-34) bipartisan Congressional vote to ban funding for any activity related to expan...
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Lila Garrett is the radio talk show host of “Connect the Dots” on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. When she saw a map of the U.S. military’s plan to join an area of southern Colorado to northern New Mexico for a total of 60,160,000 acres of land or 94,000 square miles, as Not One More Acre (www.not1moreacre.net) has calculated them, Garrett cried, “My God, this is the Pentagon’...
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A real estate developer, an artist, and a farmer are all, understandably, going to look at the same piece of property with different eyes: the first for what he can build on it; the second for how he can paint it; the third, for what he could grow on it. Taosenos are in the same place in their opinions about the property adjacent to Overland Sheepskin Company north of D. Ben Romero Road in El Prado where Family Dollar Store wants to build. We all come to the property with different ey...
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“How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives” is the subtitle of a book by Nick Turse called “The Complex”—recommended reading for anyone concerned about the state of America’s democracy. An obvious example of how the military invades our everyday lives is the whole proposed Low Altitude Training Navigation (LATN) over 60,700 beautiful, peaceful and silent square miles in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. The invasion ...
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The hearing of the lawsuit the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), a non-profit nuclear education and watchdog organization, brought against the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, responsible for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), took place on the mornings of April 27 and May 2, 2011, in the Federal Court Building in Albuquerque before U.S. District Judge Judith Herrera. The case is important enough that [as of May 20] Judge Herrera is still ...
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People who think the proposed Air Force training flights of assault (and assault-support) aircraft over 55 peaceful counties in Northern New Mexico and southern Colorado are a “small price to pay for freedom and liberty” have drunk the Kool-Aid.

No nation has...
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Maybe the U.S. Air Force thought no one would notice its plan to turn some 87,000 square miles of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado into a training ground for Low Altitude Tactical Navigation (LATN) if their copy announcing it were measured in square inches. The plan provides for 688 flights every year by pilots of both the C-130 Hercules and the CV-22 Osprey airplanes. Low Altitude means flying 200 feet above the ground—in high alti...
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I asked a bright and educated 33-year-old friend if she ever thought about the atomic bomb.

“No,” she replied.

“What would it take for you to read an article about the bomb?”  

“Well, I guess I’d read it if it were a story about people.”

&...
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Seeing a film clip on the Internet made by Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, of the ocean eerily bubbling like a chemistry experiment as it washed up on a wide beach in Pensacola, Florida, already blackened with oil made me weep. (You can see what I describe at http://www.opednews.com/Podcast/Robert-Jensen-on-facing-a-by-Rob-Kall-10062...
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Why doesn’t the U.S. government have a building as big as the Pentagon to work on peace? For "big," of course, the Pentagon makes the Guinness Book of Records: it covers the largest ground area of any office building in the world—34 acres including a five-acre central courtyard. The Pentagon’s five stories give it a floor space of 3,705,793 square feet with its corridors running an astonishing 17.5 miles. Taking up four blocks...
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Most people living in the great expanses of northern New Mexico appreciate seeing rainbows touch the ground from end to end. They know that majestic wooded mountains, turquoise skies by day, and spangled skies by night rightly earn the state its official description, "The Land of Enchantment." Against this backdrop, it’s a wonder New Mexico’s nuclear weapons industry hasn’t caused the state to be renamed the "Land of Disenchantment."<...
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President Obama has proposed to offer $54 billion in loans for construction of new nuclear reactors. This should come as no surprise to his supporters because throughout his presidential campaign he said he was in favor of nuclear power. So here we are.

It’s a nice deal if you are a nuclear power corporation. You keep all the profits, but if you fail to repay the loan, the taxpayers pay for it. According to Nuclear Information and Resource Service, 50% of n...
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Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." A corollary of his saying could be "The unexamined holiday is not worth celebrating." What would we find if we examined Memorial Day?

The holiday we now call Memorial Day had originally been set aside on May 30, 1868, as Decoration Day, a time to remember the Civil War dead and to clean up and decorate their graves with flowers.

It could be argued that Decoration Day got...
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What is justice? Considering how soon the pre-schooler, new to the knack of stringing words into sentences, is claiming, "Hey! That’s not fair!" human beings seemed wired for justice. Something in us wants to make what’s wrong right again, to restore the balance, the harmony. Injustice seems so easily recognizable; it offends our sensibilities. What are the claims that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, John Ashcrof...
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In April 2000, then-Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Bill Richardson admitted for the first time that workers at nuclear weapons plants had been harmed by radiation and toxic poisoning. Richardson pushed for President Bill Clinton to sign into law in October 2000 to become effective in July 2001 the Energy Employee Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA--"ee-ok-pa"--or the Act), calling on stage a cast of acronyms that make the diminutives in Russian novels...
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PHILIP SCHOFIELD, PYRO/CHEMICAL TECHNICIAN, TALKS ABOUT HIS FATHER: "He was what you call a jack of all trades, a welder, a painter, carpenter. He could do it all. . . He wound up becoming their handyman. . .He worked up (at the Lab) until about six months before he died. He finally got so sick, he had to give it up. He died of cancer. They said it was prostrate but there was never an autopsy done. We wonder if it wasn’t something else because on his right arm he has a sc...
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Fifty-five miles downwind of Los Alamos, Taosenos may be surprised to learn that, according to Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), eleven new nuclear warheads or plutonium "pits" were manufactured for the first time since 1949 at Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) in 2007. Confirming the number of pits, Kevin Roark, a spokesperson at the Labs explains, "The pits are the nuclear triggers, what initiates the nuclear reaction."

Alm...
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If George W. Bush were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict him? What if in the roundup, Mohandas K. Gandhi was inadvertently hauled in for the same charge? Gandhi, of course, was the Hindu leader whose adherence to non-violent resistance helped free India in 1947 from British colonial rule. During the debate in Iowa for the presidential election in 2000, when the moderator asked the candidates what philosopher they admired the most, Bush blurted out "Ch...
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On Aug. 26, 2004, just days before the Republican National Convention opened in Madison Square Garden, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark convened an Iraq War Crimes Tribunal at the Martin Luther King, Jr. High School on Amsterdam Avenue at 65th Street.

Addressing the 500 people assembled in the auditorium, Clark remembered, "I read the Judgment (of Nuremberg) as soon as it came out and I hadn’t even been to college. On page 12, it held that the...
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In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser’s description of the dissociation of workers in fast-food chains like McDonald’s from the end product of their work could apply to the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Schlosser points out that it is not a chef who cooks the hamburger; instead one employee readies the bun, another lays on a patty of meat, another applies a dollop of catsup, and so forth. The employees who assemble a hamburger are expendable becau...
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When I ask myself why I believe the United States should not invade Iraq, as the Bush administration seems fixing to do, I find myself wondering how my inner Porky Pig might put it.

A long time ago, when I was seven or eight years old, I read a Porky Pig comic book that made a lasting impression on me. In the story, as I recall, the Acme Bubble Gum Company offered a prize—a trip around the world—to the winner who, in twenty-five words or less, cou...
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The ink was barely dry on the 1991 cease-fire before the U.N. Security Council set up a commission to process claims against Iraq totaling more than $300 billion for damages suffered during the Persian Gulf War. The claims totaled almost five times the cost of the war.

With no money budgeted for its administration, the U.N. Compensation Commission, a subsidiary organ of the Security Council, was launched on the "voluntary contributions" of U.N. member natio...
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The U.S. State Department warned Phyllis Bennis not to go to Iraq because of the danger. A fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, the progressive Washington think-tank, Bennis traveled to Iraq anyway at the end of August with a delegation of congressional staffers she had organized for a humanitarian fact-finding mission. Privately sponsored, the group represented the first congressional staff to travel to Iraq since the Persian Gulf War.

What dangers did the St...
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In early March, the new Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR-USA) Rev. John Dear led a seven-person delegation to Iraq. Dear traveled with Nobel Peace Laureates Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland and Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina. "What we saw in Iraq," Dear says, was "not just heartbreaking, but horrific."

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Dear says, over one million Iraqi ci...
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Suzy Kane has a long history of trying to "sort things out," as she says. But with the war drums beating loud in recent weeks for a heavy military response to Iraq, sorting things out has become difficult, even exasperating. "It seems to me we’re asking the wrong questions," said the Bedford Hills resident and writer and researcher on the Persian Gulf War. "Everyone knows the evil deeds of Saddam Hussein—who wasn’t exactly voted int...
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One fact of the Persian Gulf War seems to have been recorded in invisible ink: the United States is the first nation in history to have intentionally bombed an operating nuclear reactor. When asked the Defense Department’s position on the issue of nuclear reactors as military targets, Admiral Eugene Carroll of the Center for Defense Information was not aware that the reactor at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center in Iraq had been in operation at the time it was bombed. "...
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When it comes to the subject of Iraq, the question people invariably ask is “What about Saddam Hussein?” the question that backs peace-lovers like WILPFers [Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom] into a rhetorical corner. Would you have wanted a madman in control of two-fifths of the world’s oil? Would you have wanted a madman, who would gas his own people, developing a nuclear bomb? Implicit in our “Of course not!&rdquo...
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The adage "For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost" could well describe the effects of the almost six-year-old sanctions on Iraq: for want of a spare part the child is lost. Since 1991, between the effects of the Gulf War and sanctions, over 200,000 Iraqi children under five have died of preventable causes.

A special UNICEF report drafted three years ago by Canadian doctor Eric Hoskins...
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The Latin words Finis origine pendent are cut into the seal of Phillips Academy (cut by Paul Revere, in fact). Phillips Academy, or "Andover," as it is called, is the preparatory school in Andover, Massachusetts, from which George Bush graduated fifty years ago. "The end depends on the beginning," the motto says. We will examine the end first, what the United Nations inspection team called the "near apocalyptic destruction" of Iraq by t...
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For many of us our consciences are soothed when the United Nations imposes "sanctions" on a miscreant such as Serbia because the word "sanctions" connotes the quality of high moral ground. Its Latin root "sanction," after all, means "to make sacred." In Judeo-Christian terms, this sacredness, or "holiness," if you will, means a "set apartness" to denote certain places, things, ceremonies, times, seasons and even persons as &quo...
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As the United States wakes up to the human rights abuses committed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government, at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in New York City on February 29, I was one of 2,000 people who attended the public session of the International War Crimes Tribunal convened by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. The Tribunal was not a mock trial of the Iraqi leader like the one conducted by the American Bar Association at its annual convention in Atla...
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