By Debra Sweet

It's looking like the U.S. — notwithstanding President Obama's speech about "justice" and "freedom" today at the March on Washington 50th anniversary — will launch air strikes on Syria in the next few days.

It's essential that visible protest in advance of, and in reaction to, such attacks are as strong as possible.

Protest Thursday August 29:

New York City 6:00 pm 43rd & 7th Ave Times Square Facebook Event

San Francisco day of, or day after at 5:00 pm Powell & Market

Chicago Thursday 8/29 5:00 pm Federal Plaza Adams & Dearborn Facebook Event

Find other cities listed by the Answer Coalition.

Libyan hospital in Zliten, bombed by NATO in 2011

Continuing our discussion of war crimes:

According to the U.S. government and media apologists, what is a war crime, and when is it cause for action?

A war crime is when a government the U.S. is not currently allied with does something that, based on self-defined national interests, can be "exposed" to provide an advantage. By definition, the U.S. does not commit war crimes, but only acts to spread democracy and freedom.

One can put together a long list of the "war crimes" that the United States has used to justify attacks on other countries, sometimes real, sometimes fabricated. An example in Only Worse Suffering and Horror Can Result from the US Attack on Syria:

“Staged, fake human rights outrages, like false testimony in the U.S. Congress that Iraqi troops disconnected incubators killing babies in Kuwait are concocted and then invoked to justify all kinds of U.S. crimes. The incubator hoax was invoked to justify the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, “Operation Desert Storm,” that killed 100,000 Iraqis and created great suffering for millions, including babies who died as a result of cutbacks in medical care resulting from U.S. sanctions that followed that war.”

Then there are the war crimes at the hands of U.S. forces or their proxies, going back to Vietnam, through Korea, Grenada, Panama, El Savador  and the list is really very long through Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, that were neither investigated, prosecuted, or resolved with apology by or the conviction of those responsible.

I would send you to the work of Bill Blum, and advisor to World Can't Wait's project WarCriminalsWatch.org, who has carefully catalogued them from the last 100 years.  You can subscribe to his Anti-Empire Report.

Whenever we hear the words "humanitarian intervention," used so freely from the Clinton administration on, we should look very closely at who benefits from what the U.S. is launching.  Just because our government has a political argument for what they plan, doesn't mean it's based on truth.

Our stand should always be: Humanity and the Planet Come First.