Month: March 2015

– because we have a page showing the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Update: After channels of communication were opened as a result of this article on Gawker, Google contacted us and said they would be restoring our ads.

However, Friday morning I received another demand to remove content from our site. Google has decided this page must be removed.

We have no intention of letting Google dictate our editorial policies.

Original post:

On 3/18/15 we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?

This is a big hit on our funding. You can bet the boys in Washington don’t like us and would just love to shut us down.

Don’t let them get away with it! We need your help today, and you can do that in two ways:

1. Make a donation to help us recover the lost revenue. We run this web site on a shoestring, and the money we fully expected to bring in from Google ads now puts a big hole our budget. We simply can’t afford to lose this income – but we’re not taking down the Abu Ghraib page. No way, no how! Please make your tax-deductible donation today.
2. Contact Google ads and give them a piece of your mind. Tell them that you don’t appreciate their efforts on behalf of the Washington censors and demand that they reinstate us immediately.
   Google Inc.
   1600 Amphitheater Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043
   Telephone: 650-253-0000
   You can also interact with Google at their forum

Thank you to all our supporters.

You can confirm that Antiwar.com is being blocked by going to Adsenseblockchecker.

Continue reading “Google Disables All Ads on Antiwar.com (Updated)”

Everyone needs a hobby. For most reporters, it seems to be freaking out about anything even vaguely ISIS-seeming.

That’s where CaliphateBook comes in, which is supposed Facebook, but for ISIS. Cute, right?

The site itself started as an incomplete CMS site, then crashed, (attacked by Anonymous, according to some) and now merely posts a single English-language message denying ties to ISIS.

The registrar information from the site claims the site administrator is in “Mosul, Islamic State.” That anyone can put anything they want in their registrar information seems to be lost on most. While it’s impossible to conclusively disprove that this site is even a thing, the fact that it was registered at GoDaddy certainly points toward it being a hoax.

The original idea of the CIA was to have independent-minded experts assessing both short- and longer-term threats to U.S. national security. Mixing with operations and politics was always a danger, which is now highlighted by CIA Director Brennan’s reorganization, opposed by a group of U.S. intelligence veterans.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: John Brennan’s Restructuring Plan for CIA

Mr. President, the CIA reorganization plan announced by Director John Brennan on Friday is a potentially deadly blow to the objective, fact-based intelligence needed to support fully informed decisions on foreign policy. We suggest turning this danger into an opportunity to create an independent entity for CIA intelligence analysis immune from the operational demands of the “war on terror.”

On Feb. 5, 2003, immediately after Colin Powell’s address to the UN, members of VIPS sent our first VIPS memorandum, urging President George W. Bush to widen the policy debate “beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

The “former senior officers” whom Brennan asked for input on the restructuring plan are a similar closed, blinkered circle, as is the “outstanding group of officers from across the Agency” picked by Brennan to look at the Agency’s mission and future. He did not include any of the intelligence community dissidents and alumni who fought against the disastrous politicization of intelligence before the attack on Iraq. Nor does Brennan’s plan reflect the lessons learned from that debacle.

Continue reading “US Intel Vets Oppose Brennan’s CIA Plan”

When Benjamin Netanyahu looked out over the joint session of Congress that had assembled to hear him speak on March 3, the Israeli prime minister almost caught a glimpse of something unusual: empty seats.

That would’ve been a rarity in Washington, where bipartisan support for the Israeli government runs deep. Just a few years ago, Netanyahu packed the house for a controversial speech on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

This time, nearly 60 Democrats boycotted the address.

That left Republicans scrambling to fill the seats with staffers and allies. They even awarded a plum front-row gallery spot to GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.

What changed?

Netanyahu had come to harangue lawmakers about the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and a group of countries led by the United States.

Continue reading “When Bibi Came to Town”

After weeks of buildup, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally delivered his long-planned speech to a joint meeting of Congress, attacking President Obama’s deal with Iran over the latter’s nuclear program. Asserting that the agreement would only empower Iran to become nuclear armed, and painting the regime as a murderous cabal set on wiping Israel from the face of the earth, the speech fit neatly with the basic gist of Netanyahu’s public pronouncements over the previous 20 or so years.

The speech was the subject of a firestorm of controversy from the very moment it was announced. In total, more than 50 Democratic Congressmen and women ended up boycotting the speech, while National Security Adviser Susan Rice told Charlie Rose it was "destructive of the fabric of the relationship" between the US and Israel. Meanwhile, as reported by Al Jazeera, a number of former and current military officers earlier suggested that Netanyahu’s decision to accept House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to speak to Congress had infuriated the US military, which was beginning to view Israel as a strategic liability.

It is interesting that this is what seems to have soured the normally subservient US political establishment on Israel and Netanyahu. After all, it could easily be argued that Israel was a strategic liability for the US long before this. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid since World War II, receiving billions of dollars military assistance a year over the last ten years, and many more billions over the decades prior. What does the US get in return for this assistance? For one, it’s dragged into supporting any and every war fought (and started) by Israel, including its last three wars in Gaza, which killed a total of more than 3,500 Palestinians, the vast majority of which were civilians, or its adventure in Lebanon which left more than 1000 Lebanese dead. The casualty figures don’t quite capture the brutality of conflicts, which also involved the maiming and large-scale displacement of civilians, the destruction of homes, and the evisceration of essential infrastructure like health care facilities and running water.

Continue reading “Netanyahu’s Crime Isn’t Playing Politics – It’s Warmongering”

The leniency shown former CIA Director (and retired General) David Petraeus by the Justice Department in sparing him prison time for the serious crimes that he has committed puts him in the same preferential, immune-from-incarceration category as those running the financial institutions of Wall Street, where, incidentally, Petraeus now makes millions. By contrast, “lesser” folks – and particularly the brave men and women who disclose government crimes – get to serve time, even decades, in jail.

Petraeus is now a partner at KKR, a firm specializing in large leveraged buyouts, and his hand-slap guilty plea to a misdemeanor for mishandling government secrets should not interfere from his continued service at the firm. KKR’s founders originally worked at Bear Stearns, the institution that failed in early 2008 at the beginning of the meltdown of the investment banking industry later that year.

Despite manifestly corrupt practices like those of subprime mortgage lenders, none of those responsible went to jail after the 2008-09 financial collapse which cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes. The bailed-out banks were judged “too big to fail” and the bankers “too big to jail.”

Two years ago, in a highly revealing slip of the tongue, Attorney General Eric Holder explained to Congress that it can “become difficult” to prosecute major financial institutions because they are so large that a criminal charge could pose a threat to the economy – or perhaps what he meant was an even bigger threat to the economy.

Continue reading “General Petraeus: Too Big to Jail”