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...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Back in the distant year 2003, my novel about a world I had inhabited for decades, The Last Days of Publishing, came out. In its last pages, three superannuated book editors huddled in a coffee shop in Manhattan, dreaming about DIY...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. When Barack Obama took office, the sky was the limit in the Greater Middle East. After all, it seemed the U.S. had hit rock bottom. President Bush had set the region aflame with a raging debacle in Iraq, a sputtering conflict in...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium – the title of a 1969 romantic comedy – could now fit two intertwined phenomena: the madcap global travels of Secretary of State John Kerry and the nonstop journey of the latest revelations from...
The foreign leaders are dropping like flies – to American surveillance. I’m talking about serial revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, two Mexican presidents, Felipe Calderón (whose office the...
