Originally posted at TomDispatch. In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote “America’s Empire of Bases” for TomDispatch, breaking what was, in effect, a silence around those strange edifices, some the size of small towns, scattered around the planet....
In what seems like another life, I used to interview American veterans of the Vietnam War. Over the course of a decade, I spoke with hundreds of them, mostly about one topic: war crimes. Some were unrepentant. An interrogator who had tortured prisoners, for instance,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Seven years after the Soviet Union collapsed in a heap of post-Afghan-War rubble and seven years after President George H.W. Bush fought the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to what looked like typical all-American...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Almost 20 years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, as the Taliban takes district after district, withdrawing American troops are discarding vast piles of junk on bases they are now abandoning. In the process, the war on terror...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. The single scariest night of my life may have been on October 22, 1962, when I thought that all the duck-and-cover moments of my childhood were coming home to roost. President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television (and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. This editor’s note introduced the single article that took up almost every inch of space in the August 31, 1946, New Yorker magazine: “TO OUR READERS: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In this century, Memorial Day, a civic holiday, has gained an almost religious tinge. That third Monday in May is meant, of course, to honor the dead of this country’s wars and has a history that goes back to the period after...
Think about this: on Saturday, May 12th, with barely an hour’s notice, Israel took out the al-Jalaa Tower, a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed the Associated Press, al-Jazeera, and other media outlets. That act of destruction, among so many others,...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. From the dawn of recorded history, humans have been making war and rape has been part of it. In ancient Greece, the rape of a woman was considered a property crime; that is, a crime against her father, husband, or master. But in war,...
