Since Barack Obama’s swearing in as US president, both the Israeli and US media have peddled the idea his administration would take a strong stand with the newly-elected Israeli hard-right government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu and foreign minister Avigador Lieberman.

Last month the Melbourne Age revealed that members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) had covered up the killing and wounding of civilians in Afghanistan by Australian Special Air Service (SAS) troops. In the same month, The Australian newspaper proudly reported the use of SAS patrols as death squads carrying out assassinations in Afghanistan.

Since late April, more than 15,000 Pakistani troops have engaged militarily with 3000-4000 Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s Swat valley in North-West Frontier Province. The fighting has displaced more than 1 million civilians, driving the total number of internal refugees from Swat to more than 2 million.

In a statement released on May 24, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the head of international relations for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran, LTTE founder and leader of the movement for a Tamil nation-state in northern Sri Lanka had been killed by the Sri Lankan troops the previous week..

The global crisis of capitalism is being used by the ALP as an excuse to water down workers’ rights and measures to tackle climate change as well as for a general “belt tightening” of public services. But the Rudd government is keeping its commitment to maintain the Howard government’s annual 3% real increase in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) budget.

Government troops were still advancing into the so-called no-fire zone in the north-east of Sri Lanka on April 29, adding to what the Australian Tamil Information Service calls “an unprecedented humanitarian crisis”.

The Australian Labor government joined the all-white boycott of the UN’s Durban Review Conference held in Geneva on April 20-24.

Six weeks after the formal cessation on January 18 of Israel’s 22-day war on the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza, Israel continues to carry out sporadic airstrikes on the small coastal region.

Australian soldiers of the Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) were searching through homes in southern Uruzgan province on February 12, when, they claimed, they were fired on by Afghan resistance fighters. The troops returned fire, killing five children and wounding two children and two adults.

[The following statement distributed by members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party at protest actions in early January against Israel’s war on Gaza.]

On January 23, just days after the Israeli military finished its 22-day war against the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military censor banned both the Israeli and international media from publishing the names of, or information about, Israeli military officers who participated in the war.

As Israel began dropping bombs on the Gaza Strip on December 27, Australian Palestine solidarity activists began organising protests. Despite occurring during the “quiet” part of the year, these protest actions snowballed in size during the weeks of Israel’s 22-day war on Gaza.

Barack Obama’s first military act as US president was to order two remote-controlled air strikes that killed 22 people, many civilians, in Waziristan, northern Pakistan. The Hellfire missile attacks on two villages were accompanied by presidential rhetoric about “smart power” and “tough love” that could easily have been spoken by his predecessor, George Bush.

Many who voted for the ALP on November 24, 2007, did so thinking that a Rudd Labor government would end Australia’s involvement in the US-led war in Iraq. One year on and the Australian military under PM Kevin Rudd is still an active cog in the US-led imperialism war machine in Iraq.

Dallas – My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F. Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror.

The war in Afghanistan is not a “good war” gone bad. It’s been an unjust, imperialist war of conquest and empire from its inception. About five hours after hijacked jets crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, US President George Bush’s defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld turned to an aide and told him to begin drawing up plans for war.

The global arms industry is a very lucrative way for businesses to profit from death, destruction and oppression. It is estimated that each year 2% of world gross domestic product (GDP), or more than US$1 trillion, is spent on the military. Part of this goes to the procurement of military hardware and services from the arms industry.

On October 25, Major-General Tariq Khan, commander of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC), announced that his officers had captured Loi Sam, a key Taliban stronghold in the Bajaur region, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

In 1964, a 22-year-old Palestinian poet named Mahmoud Darwish shared the struggle of his people with the world, writing: “Record!/ I am an Arab/ And my identity card is number fifty thousand/ I have eight children/ And the ninth is coming after a summer/ Will you be angry? … Record! I am an Arab/ I have a name without a title/ ...

In the months preceding the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq, the French government’s opposition received a great deal of publicity. This led to illusions among some anti-war activists that the French rulers represented a progressive alternative to the “Anglo-Saxon” imperialists.

Officially the governments that wage war on the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan acknowledge that by August 26 this year, 4460 of their troops had died in Iraq and 934 had died in Afghanistan.

Here’s a non-trivial question for trivia night organisers: In the late 1960s, what was the world’s busiest airport? Stumped? Here’s a hint: What was the most bombed country, per capita, in the history of warfare? If you answered “Vietnam”, you’re getting close, but not quite there.

Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?
Directed by Morgan Spurlock
Running time 93 minutes

An estimated 80,000 were killed in a few seconds on August 6, 1945, when the first atom bomb, “Little Boy”, was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima from a US Army Air Force B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Enola Gay. About 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. Two days later, the second nuclear bomb, “Fat Man”, was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Stand Fast

On behalf of Stand Fast I’d like to thank Direct Action for James Donaldson’s article [“Anti-war veterans group formed” DA #1] on our group. Already we have received positive feedback about Stand Fast via our website, www.stand-fast.webs.com, from readers of DA.