Originally posted at TomDispatch. Imagine a secret government facility buried deep in the bowels of a mountain; a deluxe bomb shelter – encased within dense, almost fissure-less rock – for top government officials to ride out doomsday. I did. A lot. I spent an...
Vladimir Putin recently manned up and admitted it. The United States remains the planet’s sole superpower, as it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. “America,” the Russian president said, “is a great power. Today, probably, the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s an oddity: Americans recognize corruption as an endemic problem in much of the world, just not in our own. And that’s strange. After all, to take but one example, America’s twenty-first-century war zones have...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here’s an unavoidable fact: we are now in a Brexit world. We are seeing the first signs of a major fragmentation of this planet that, until recently, the cognoscenti were convinced was globalizing rapidly and headed for...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. One of the strangest news developments of our time is the way the media now focus for days, if not weeks, 24/7, on a single event and its ramifications. Omar Mateen’s slaughter of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando is...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched a bombing campaign against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. An invasion to “liberate” the country followed. Almost 15 years...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. When it comes to Pentagon weapons systems, have you ever heard of cost “underruns”? I think not. Cost overruns? They turn out to be the unbreachable norm, as they seem to have been from time immemorial. In 1982, for...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I can’t tell you exactly why I clicked on the article, but it was probably the title: “The Double-Tap Couple.” To me, a “double tap” is the technique of firing two gunshots in quick succession or...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If you happen to be a potential American war criminal, you've had a few banner weeks. On May 9th, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter presented former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger with the Department of...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here's last week’s good news on America’s war fronts: finally, there’s light at the end of the tunnel! From one end of the Greater Middle East to the other, things are looking up for Washington. A U.S. Air Force...
