Please don't write in with a correction. I know just as well as you do that we're approaching the fifth, not the sixth, anniversary of the moment when, on March 19, 2003, George W. Bush told the American people: "My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and...
Fidel Castro, the First Superdelegate
As the Obama-Clinton primary tussle threatens to go right through, perhaps, November 2010, the political news is everywhere: The superdelegates are "feeling the pressure"; those 795 nabobs of the Democratic Party, once meant in part as a brake against a popular...
The Cost of a Week in Hell
How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200...
The Commander-in-Chef Cooks Up a Storm
In the week that oil prices once again crested above $100 a barrel and more Americans than at any time since the Great Depression owed more on their homes than the homes were worth; in the year that the subprime market crashed, global markets shuddered, the previously...
The World’s Most Wanted
On Feb. 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: "one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National...
Gaza Struggling Under Siege
From Chiapas, Mexico, and Vietnam's Mekong Delta to West Africa (where a war against women is now underway), TomDispatch has lately been traveling to some of the more scarred places on the planet. Today, Jen Marlowe, a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist...
Visiting the Torture Museum
According to the New Yorker's Paul Kramer, here's what A.F. Miller of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment wrote in a letter to the Omaha World-Herald in May 1900 from the Philippines about the treatment of a prisoner taken by his unit: "Now, this is the way we give...
How Never to Withdraw
From Iraq
Think of the top officials of the Bush administration as magicians when it comes to Iraq. Their top hats and tails may be worn and their act fraying, but it doesn't seem to matter. Their latest "abracadabra," the president's "surge strategy" of 2007, has still worked...
The Lost Kristol Tapes
As Eric Alterman has written, he's the "journalist" of "perpetual wrongness" (as well as an "apparatchik" of the first order and a "right-wing holy warrior"). And for that, he's perpetually hired or published: Fox News, the Washington Post op-ed page, Time Magazine,...
The Growing Military-Industrial Complex in Asia
Often what is hidden in our world is so simply because no cares or thinks to look. Yes, a fair amount of attention has recently been given to the staggering new Pentagon budget request, the largest since World War II, that the Bush administration has just submitted to...


