The U.S. prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base reached its shameful 20th anniversary of operations on January 11 — with a legacy marked by the detention of nearly 800 Muslim men and boys, the majority of them held without charge or trial for years and many subjected...
How Israel’s ‘Facebook Law’ Plans To Control All Palestinian Content Online
It is ironic that even former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rejected a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) bill which proposed to give the government greater power to control and suppress online content. This was in 2016, and the bill was...
Godot Likely To Arrive Before Russia Invades Ukraine
"Foiled again!" rose the cry Friday from those expecting Russian President Vladimir Putin to step out of character and risk war, just as he finally succeeds in getting the U.S. to take Russia’s security concerns seriously – and even address them. Russia’s...
Iraq Daily Roundup: 18 Killed
Guantánamo’s Forever Elusive Endgame
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Yes, many of its prisoners, swept up in the early days of the war on terror, had committed no hostile acts against this country or its allies (55% of them, according to one study). And yes, they were dressed in those unforgettable...
Why Washington’s Focus on ‘Credibility’ Is a Recipe for War
The most pressing threat to global security right now isn’t so-called "provocations" by either Russia or China. It is the United States’ misplaced obsession with its own "credibility". This rallying cry by Washington officials – echoed by the media and allies in...
Breathe Easier: Blinken, Lavrov Meet Friday
Whoa! Could this mean that reports of the death of U.S.-Russia security talks are greatly exaggerated? What about the impasse, the deadlock? Might it mean no Russian invasion of Ukraine – at least not yet? Actually, figuring out what the planned bilateral talks Friday...
The Cold War, Reborn and Resurgent
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In the early 1960s, at the height of America’s original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear...
America’s Secret Government Crisis
America's founding generation believed that an informed citizenry was vital to the survival of the Republic. Writing to theologian and philosopher Richard Price on January 8, 1789, Thomas Jefferson observed with satisfaction how his countrymen had come to largely...


