Yes, on a radio show, Israeli Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu insisted that there were “no non-combatants in Gaza” (assumedly including the thousands of young people slaughtered in recent weeks in that “children’s graveyard”). He then added that “one option” for...
I started TomDispatch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the launching of what President George W. Bush quickly labeled “the Global War on Terror.” And here we are, 22 years after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in the ruins of the Pentagon and told an...
When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities. On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. When it comes to war, increasingly autonomous drones are now, it seems, the name of the game. Only the other day, in its stunning surprise attack on Israel, Hamas claimed to have launched 35 explosive-laden al-Zawari “kamikaze”...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In September 2007, Karen Greenberg ominously titled her third report for TomDispatch “Guantanamo Forever.” Give her credit. So many years ago, she grasped all too clearly the nightmarish nature of that bastion of injustice. Sixteen...
Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for...
Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “duck and cover”...
In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq. And as a...
On September 11th, 22 years later, what are we to make of it all? Who even remembers that, as the Pentagon burned, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld picked up a scrap of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from the smoking ruins of that building. Soon after,...
In a June 2012 piece headlined “Praying at the Church of St. Drone,” I wrote, “Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” At...
