AJAMU BARAKA—Domestic colonial containment and imperialist counterrevolutionary policies are costly. But the brunt of the price is paid by the colonized and exploited working classes and peoples of the U.S. that pay for and die in U.S. wars of aggression, and by the peoples and nations that are bombed, subverted politically, sanctioned to death, and destroyed by the U.S. state and its European allies.

On the same day that the National Priorities Project report was issued, Brown University’s Cost of War Project release a report that estimated the war in Iraq and Afghanistan killed almost a million people and cost more than $8 trillion dollars.

We were eventually introduced to Glen in person at the 2010 Left Forum conference. From that first meeting, we would occasionally catch up with him when we visited New York City. Glen would take the train over from New Jersey and meet us at a downtown bar and we would spend a few hours talking politics and laughing at Glen’s stories of life in the military and in the media.

Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with investigative journalist Gareth Porter about his recent article in The Grayzone which analyses the media’s coverage of the Biden Administrations withdrawal from Afghanistan. Porter explains how major outlets from The New York Times to PBS regurgitated talking points from US military without question in order to undermine support for the withdrawal.

On Foreign Agents, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton expose the biggest frauds recruited as defectors and dissidents to lie about Official Enemies by the US regime. For well over a century now, London and Washington have excelled at disinformation using phony witnesses and false flags, the latest campaigns including the Skripal and Navalny “poisonings”, the downing of MH17 “by Russia”, Russiagate itself, and the myriad accusation against China, Venezuela, etc. The list is long.

RICHARD MEDHURST—The idea of achieving women’s emancipation through military occupation is a farce. You cannot have women’s rights, human rights or any rights when you live under the military rule of a foreign occupying power. You are subject to their rule.

Even if you want to believe Bush and Blair’s excuses to try and justify this war; saying that they were going after Al Qaeda, well this has nothing to do with that. They didn’t say they were invading Afghanistan for the sake of women’s rights – no matter how just or noble that may sound now. So, to try and use women’s rights now to deflect from the horrors they inflicted on Afghanistan, the millions of people they turned into refugees, the scores they killed – many of whom are women– is an attempt to whitewash their crimes and an insult to people’s intelligence.