Portside

A tribunal this year uncovered grave violations against the human, economic, and cultural rights of Filipinos by Washington and their own leaders.

How many US military bases are there in Africa? For years, US Africa Command gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti was America's only acknowledged "base" on the continent. Research by TomDispatch indicates that in recent years the US military has, in fact, developed a remarkably extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points in Africa. These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites are in at least 34 countries

America's leading Sunni ally is proving how easily hubris, delusion, and old-fashioned ineptitude can trump even bottomless wealth. The price of oil dropped from $115 a barrel in June 2014 to around $44 today. While it costs less than $10 to produce a barrel of Saudi oil, the Saudis need a price between $95 and $105 to balance their budget. The country's leaders are now burning through their foreign reserves to make up the difference.

To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border to Libya. Though you’ll seldom find it mentioned in one place, five countries in the region -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen -- have all disintegrated as nation states. Three were the focus of direct American interventions, the fourth (Yemen) was turned into a drone hunting ground.

The Middle-East map is being redrawn in Syria and Iraq by Moscow and Washington. The Obama Administration is co-leading with the Kremlin to help slice the Syria-Iraq area into five or more political states so as to deconflict this region and hopefully reduce the attractiveness of ISIL.

President Obama’s decision to leave actually ending, as opposed to officially “ending,” the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan to his successor (barring Congress developing the nerve and the decency to act) illustrates our collective and his personal failure to overcome what candidate Obama once called the mindset that gets us into wars.

Today we are fighting back for the respect of the Geneva Conventions. As a medical humanitarian organization, we are fighting back for the sake of our patients. We need you, as members of the public, to stand with us to insist that even wars have rules. This was not just an attack on our hospital-it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated. These Conventions govern the rules of war and were established to protect civilians in conflicts...

Controversial posting, by a long-time peace and social justice activist - Obama is the best occupant of the office since the end of World War II. We're unlikely to elect anyone of his quality in 2016. Like all presidents post-World War II, he has presided over the world's most (super) powerful empire. 'American exceptionalism' and flouting superior military and economic might, the empire systematically generates negative consequences for peace at home and worldwide.

People and groups have been labeled terrorists by the Philippine government, the U.S. government and other countries at the behest of the U.S. government. The Philippine government engages in - red tagging - political vilification. Targets are frequently human rights activists and advocates, political opponents, community organizers or groups struggling for national liberation. Those targeted for assassination are placed on the order of battle list.