Antiwar.com Blog

This is not a well-known story. Congress covered it up at the time. This was bipartisan murder.

The military could not meet its quotas. The draft was failing. Volunteers could not fill the ranks. In response, Robert McNamara devised a solution: draft low-IQ men who could not read or write. The military drafted over 300,000 of them. Over 10% of the men who died in Vietnam could not read their own dog tags. They died at rates three times higher than IQ 85+ troops.

Meanwhile, back in America, the keg parties went on.

To justify this program, McNamara told the public that military training would raise their IQ’s. How? By the use of videotapes. Yes, he actually said this. Those who know about this technology’s history will see the ludicrousness of the claim. The machines were costly and unknown to the general public in the 1960’s. The military did not use these machines to train low-IQ men in boot camp. In any case, videotape lessons do not raise people’s IQ’s.

Continue reading “McNamara’s Martyrs: Low-IQ Substitutes for College Men With Deferments”

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. ~ Jacques Ellul

I have long had mixed feelings about technology. On the one hand, I regard the Industrial Revolution as, perhaps, the most important period in our known human history; having allowed us to both understand and act within social systems that maximized our capacities for the production and exchange of the material values that sustain life. The earlier advances provided by the agricultural revolution, combined with industrialization meant that our nutritional menus were no longer confined to the bugs, berries, and tree barks from which our hunting-and-gathering ancestors made their daily dietary selections.

On the other hand, while technologies have largely been created by individuals, they generally end up being financed by and housed within institutions. We become attached to the technologies we associate with the quality of our lives. If Congress, or an imperious president, were to announce that we could keep our Internet connections only if we allowed the state to monitor all our communications; how many of us would reject the proposal? And how many would eagerly accept, lest we lose access to the machinery we believe necessary for our material well-being?

Continue reading “Drones and Surveillance in Our Brave New World”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Michael Horton is similarly skeptical about Mattis and Pompeo’s calls for a ceasefire in Yemen:

Yet these exhortations are meaningless without real pressure on Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are poised to launch yet another offensive on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah.

The first offensive on the port, dubbed ”Operation Golden Victory,” began five months ago and was meant to be a quick strike that would eject the Houthi rebels and their allied forces. It has been anything but quick. The Houthis have launched successive and largely successful counter-offensives.

Meanwhile, as a tragic result of this horrible war, millions of Yemenis face starvation in what is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. That may be exactly what is desired by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their backers – which so far has included the United States.

Last night in Sanaa, the Saudi coalition launched dozens of airstrikes. Meanwhile, they have been gathering reinforcements to begin a new assault on Hodeidah. The offensive on the port city has already displaced hundreds of thousands and threatened the food supply for millions more in the interior, and a new assault could be all that it takes to kick millions of starving people into the abyss. Four weeks from now, the damage done to Yemen’s civilian population may already be done and no one will be be able to undo it. That is why there must be an immediate ceasefire, and that begins with an immediate end to U.S. support for the war.

Continue reading “Yemen Can’t Wait for a Ceasefire”

The 2018 US intelligence community budget saw its biggest increase in ten years and is now higher than it has ever been. President Trump’s backers often claim that he’s in Washington to fight the deep state, but it doesn’t get more “deep state” than the US intelligence community. How to explain this massive increase? Do they think we are safer and more free with an even larger spy network watching us and meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

According to a new study by the University of Sussex, the 10,000 civilian dead in the Yemen war is hugely understated. The actual number of civilians killed since the Saudi attacks started in 2015 may be as high as 80,000. And on top of that, 50,000 children die each year from preventable illnesses related to the war. Why does the US continue to act as an accomplice in this massacre? Will Congress finally step up and put a stop to it? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

It may surprise some that a Canadian general is undercutting inter-Korean rapprochement while Global Affairs Canada seeks to maintain its 70-year old war footing, but that is what the Liberal government is doing.

At the start of the month Canadian Lieutenant General Wayne Eyre told a Washington audience that the North Koreans were "experts at separating allies" and that a bid for a formal end to the Korean war represented a "slippery slope" for the 28,500 US troops there. "So what could an end-of-war declaration mean? Even if there is no legal basis for it, emotionally people would start to question the presence and the continued existence of the United Nations Command," said Eyre at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. "And it’s a slippery slope then to question the presence of U.S. forces on the peninsula."

The first non-US general to hold the post since the command was created to fight the Korean War in 1950, Eyre became deputy commander of the UNC at the end of July. He joined 14 other Canadian officers with UNC.

Continue reading “Canada Seems To Prefer State of ‘War’ in Korea”