Portside

CIA impunity in 1988. U.S. imperialism's baby steps in 1898. Free speech for Nazis in 1978. U.S. responsibility for Vietnam War in 1971. Smallpox-infected presents in 1763. Voting wrongs, not rights, in 2013. Haymarket prisoners pardoned in 1893.

The government of Guam has appointed a Commission on Decolonization, but U.S. control means that all of the island’s options, including the status quo, have substantial downsides.

There are five territories of the US that are unincorporated, meaning not expected to become states. Not all constitutional protections apply to the people who live in those territories, but it's never been clear which ones do and which don't.

“What Guam came to realize is that what’s most important to us [is]— our islands, our people, our environment, our land — and regardless of what you are, we wanted to put the people in office who are going to fight for those things.”

In January, three residents from the U.S. territory of Guam visited Japan to express their solidarity with Okinawans struggling to block construction of new U.S. military facilities on their island.

The United States is using this Pacific colony as its own private firing range.

Most nonproliferation experts — as well as former President Jimmy Carter and a number of former Pentagon and State Department officials, both Republican and Democrat — agree that the brutal and murderous Kim, for all his bluster, is not irrational or suicidal, but bent on preserving his regime and preventing a U.S. attack. Nuclear weapons are a defensive, not an offensive, tool for the North Korean leadership.