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Glenn Greenwald

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 10:34 PM UTC

The fraud of “humanitarian wars”

All wars, even the most unjustifiably aggressive, are wrapped in the same pretty rhetorical packaging

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(updated below)

Last month, I spoke at the University of Chicago as part of an event entitled “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Empire: Humanitarian Intervention and Neo-Orientalism.” Sponsored by the Muslim Students Association, the event also included Oxford Professor Tariq Ramadan, law professor and U.N. war crimes expert M. Cherif Bassiouni, and University of Chicago Professor Jennifer Pitts. My talk, roughly 30 minutes long, focused on how so-called “humanitarian interventions” are manipulatively used to justify wars of aggression and self-interest, and can be heard on the player below (my talk begins at roughly 57:40: simply move the cursor to that mark, as it loads quickly). The full event, including the other three talks and the question-and-answer session – all of which was really quite excellent —  can also be viewed on the player below by starting at the beginning, or can be heard here.

 

UPDATE: I meant to note that much of the material I used for this speech came from the work of the always-excellent Jonathan Schwarz.

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Glenn Greenwald (email: GGreenwald@salon.com) is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America's

two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.




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