When Daniel Ellsberg visited Los Angeles in mid-December, promoting his important new book The Doomsday Machine, his central message was that the threat of nuclear holocaust was more looming than generally believed.  The American people have been lulled to sleep, distracted by endless media and political spectacles, while busy warmakers keep refining their insane nuclear blueprints that, once actualized, could incinerate several hundred million people in a matter of hours, if not minutes.   More than 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pentagon elites still theorize and fantasize about the unthinkable, their demented plans far removed from the realm of political debate or even public awareness. More

I would tell the truth about what would have happened in 1956, had the US allowed a national election in a temporarily divided Vietnam to take place, as stipulated by the Geneva Accords of 1954, namely, that Ho Chi Minh would have received an overwhelming majority of the vote and become president of a unified Vietnam.  (President Dwight D. Eisenhower and I are in agreement on this point.)  This would have prevented the 2nd Indochina War, thereby saving the lives of at least 3.8 million Vietnamese and 58,300 US Americans.  In addition, there would have been no devastating war legacies that continue to maim and kill 43 years after the liberation of Saigon and the US beat a hasty retreat.  More

The first pathetic pieces of wreckage from North Korean fishing boats known as “ghost ships” to be found this year are washing up on the coast of northern Japan. These are the storm-battered remains of fragile wooden boats with unreliable engines in which North Korean fishermen go far out to sea in the middle of winter in a desperate search for fish. More