The Triumph of James Comey

Since FBI Director James Comey has become a kind of arbiter of the political discourse – to say his pronouncements have been decisive would not, I think, be an overstatement – his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee was much anticipated. As Hillary...

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Terror Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Our lives are, of course, our histories, which makes us all, however inadvertently, historians. Part of my own history, my other life – not the TomDispatch one that’s consumed me for the last 14 years – has been editing books. I...

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America’s Endless Afghan War

News this week that 300 Marines have returned to Helmand Province in Afghanistan recalls the failed surge of 2009-10, when roughly 20,000 Marines beat back the Taliban in the region, only to see those “fragile” gains quickly turn to “reversible” ones (to cite the...

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The Syrian Side of the Story You Never Hear

Like a badly written series of romance novels, the plot template remains fixed while just the names of the characters and places rotate through the template. The story of Syria that Americans and Canadians ingest from the mainstream media is the same simplistic...

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