Originally posted at TomDispatch. Recently, the historian Marilyn Young, an old friend, died. She spent her life writing about America’s wars and a country at war. Her New York Times obituary quoted this telling passage from a speech she gave to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations: “I find that I have spent …
Continue reading “Body Count for the American Century”
Upon waking this [Tuesday] morning, with some vague idea of what I’d be writing about today – the weakness of the antiwar movement, the utter uselessness of what passes for the “left,” the seeming impossibility of accomplishing anything meaningful in the current political atmosphere – I went directly to my computer. As is my wont, …
Continue reading “A Tale of Two Protests”
Although many details are still hazy because of secrecy – and further befogged by politics – it appears House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was informed last week about invasive electronic surveillance of senior U.S. government officials and, in turn, passed that information onto President Trump. This news presents Trump with an unwelcome but unavoidable …
Continue reading “The Surveillance State Behind Russia-gate”
Heavy battles and civilian executions continue in Mosul.
There was high drama last week when Rep. Devin Nunes announced at the White House that he had seen evidence that the communications of the Donald Trump campaign people, and perhaps even Trump himself, had been “incidentally collected” by the US government. If true, this means that someone authorized the monitoring of Trump campaign communications …
Continue reading “Did the Government Spy on Trump? Of Course. It Spies on All of Us!”
Fresh civilian casualties in airstrikes were reported on Monday.
They said the election of Donald Trump would usher in an era of political repression in which the First Amendment would come under attack – and they were right, although not in the way they meant it: “Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation …
Continue reading “Where the Anti-Russian Moral Panic is Leading Us”
The health department in Nineveh province reported a cholera outbreak in Mosul.
The fighting in Mosul paused on Saturday after it was revealed that hundreds of civilians were killed in an airstrike.
President Trump’s budget proposal would increase military spending $54 billion, not quite a 10 percent increase over the current level. According to Quartz, the increase alone is more than all but two countries – China and Saudi Arabia – spend on their militaries. (China spends $145 billion, Saudi Arabia $57 billion, Russia $47, and Iran …
Continue reading “Trump’s Military Budget Is Not NATO’s Fault” 
