I am writing this on October 22, the fifty-third anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, the day when President John F. Kennedy made a speech to the nation announcing that the US had detected Soviet missile bases being constructed in Cuba – and demanding that they be...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Sometimes I imagine the last 14 years of American war policy in the Greater Middle East as a set of dismal Mad Libs. An example might be: The United States has spent [your choice of multiple billions of dollars] building up [fill in...
The presidential candidate and former secretary of state insisted during the recent Democratic debate that Snowden should have remained in the United States to voice his concerns about government spying on U.S. citizens. Instead, she claimed, he “endangered US...
Drone (don’t call them) assassinations must feel good. They must feel effective. You don’t need to worry about Gitmo, or moving prisoners into the US after Gitmo becomes unpopular. You just kill the bad guys with your superior technology. It’s very Democrat. Very...
You may not like Donald Trump, for any one of a number of reasons, but anti-interventionists have to give him some credit for opening up the presidential debate to a critique of US foreign policy that hasn’t been seen or heard since the Ron Paul campaign. On Syria and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border to Libya. Certainly, as the recent Republican and Democratic...
What is it about whistleblowers that the powers that be can’t stand? When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program, I was derided in many quarters as a traitor. My detractors in the government attacked me for violating my secrecy agreement, even...
