The American War Dead Disappear Into the Darkness
America's heroes? Not so much. Not anymore. Not when they're dead, anyway. Remember as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, when the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and...
Taking Down America
Trying to play down the significance of an ongoing WikiLeaks dump of more than 250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom: “The fact is, governments deal with the United States because...
The National Security State Cops a Feel
It's finally coming into focus, and it's not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it...
Petraeus’s Two Campaigns
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Last Saturday, Chalmers Johnson died. I'm particularly proud that, in his last years, he did much of his most penetrating analysis of American militarism and our war state for this Web site. He penned his first piece for TomDispatch,...
All War All the Time
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I'm sad to report that Chalmers Johnson died on Saturday. He was a stalwart of this site, writing for it regularly from its early moments. Without the slightest doubt, he was one of the most remarkable authors I've had the pleasure to...
Guilty Until Proven Guilty
Off-Base America
Last year, it was Kuwait, Qatar, and Iraq. This year, it's Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Next year, it could easily be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Diego Garcia, Bahrain, and Turkey. Or of course they could choose to play in Japan (with a...
The Stimulus Package in Kabul
You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn't going to end, is it? Not ever. Rationally, you know perfectly well that whatever your “it” might be will indeed end, because everything does, but your gut tells you something different. I had...
