Originally posted at TomDispatch. In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, U.S.A., to be instructed in the glories of our political system. You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights,...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. The headline – “Bride and Boom!” – was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Another week, another revelation about spying by the National Security Agency. This time, it was the NSA’s infiltration of online video games and virtual realms like World of Warcraft and Second Life. And it was hardly a shock. More...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the years when I was growing up more or less middle class, American war on the childhood front couldn’t have been sunnier. True, American soldiers were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict in Korea and we kids often...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Call it the Jason Bourne strategy. Think of it as the CIA’s plunge into Hollywood – or into the absurd.  As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Once upon a time, you might have said that someone “disappeared.” But in the 1970s in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, that verb grew eerily more active in its passive form. He or she no longer “disappeared,”...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. As with the rest of our homeland security state, when it comes to border security, reality checks aren’t often in the cards. The money just pours into a world of remarkable secrecy and unaccountability. Last week, however, the...

Originally posted at TomDispatch.In 2010, I arrived at Harvard University with a mess of a manuscript – 10 years' worth of research on American war crimes in Vietnam patchworked together in such a way that it was comprehensible to only one person on the planet: me....

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the...

Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was exactly 95 years ago: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the moment when major hostilities in the charnel house that was World War I ended. In 1919, November 11th officially became “Armistice...