Say What?
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 3:50PM What criteria must be met to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
Whomever has accomplished the most towards building fraternity between nations, for abolishing or reducing standing armies, and for the achievement and promotion of peace.
You read that correctly. Barak Obama did not meet any of that criteria – and yet he was awarded it in 2009. Even worse, Henry Kissinger received it in 1973 for negotiating the Vietnam Peace Accord, which his Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, refused to accept – and for good reason. Kissinger, of course, was one of the minds behind the coup that removed Salvador Allende from power and saw the Pinochet regime installed. That coup took place in September of 1973, the same year Kissinger won the Peace Prize. Pinochet’s regime would go on to imprison, torture, and disappear thousands of Chileans. When Pinochet died in 2006, having staved off repeated attempts to bring him to justice for his various crimes, there were 300 outstanding criminal charges against him in Chile alone.
When Obama won, there were still troops in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan was being escalated. Further, the United States still covertly operated Black Sites, Guantanmo and Bagram were both known detention facilities that operated beyond the purview of international law and the Geneva Conventions, and various covert initiatives around the world were either being implemented or continued. The US Defense Budget for this fiscal year is over $1 trillion dollars. The year after Obama won the Peace Prize, here’s what global spending looked like…
The only conclusion that I can come to is that the hash and opium that’s being "destroyed" in Afghanistan is actually being shipped directly to the prize committee.
The Inevitable Weight
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 10:06AM It has been said before, and by many – US foreign policy is US domestic policy. Any society steeped in the tenets of militarism, no matter its excuses, no matter its glorified political traditions, is a society doomed to fail precisely because it labors under the misconception that failure is an utter impossibility. At present, while many looking in from the outside can see it as clear as day, most within refuse to even entertain the possibility. And what that ultimately makes the United States at this extremely crucial point in its history is the single largest threat to international stability and security on the planet.