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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Why we Oppose Nato by Bernardine Dohrn/Bill Ayers « Bill Ayers

Why we Oppose Nato by Bernardine Dohrn/Bill Ayers « Bill Ayers:


Why we Oppose Nato by Bernardine Dohrn/Bill Ayers

The day after the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration took dozens of extreme, transformative actions, including invoking Article 5, the right to collective self-defense, of NATO’s founding charter—a first in NATO’s 50-year history.

This marked the fateful expansion of NATO’s mission into new geographical regions (such as Afghanistan) and novel functions, such as the initiation and rationalization of the use of pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states. All of this was codified and consolidated over the next months in support of the US “war on terror:” crimes committed by non-nation state actors were reframed as “acts of war,” and NATO nations were now expected to join together and respond in kind, opening a door onto war without end, world-wide conflict, and the “long war.” This is why groups of citizens in virtually every NATO nation have come together to press their governments to leave this deadly enterprise.

NATO has become part of the background noise that over time and with repetition we simply take for granted, an