Lobbying for War

Originally posted at TomDispatch. As William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger reported at TomDispatch recently, the national security budget has reached $1.25 trillion annually without evidently peaking, while the U.S. military fights wars without end across a...

read more

Pretexts for an Attack on Iran

An Iraq-War redux is now in full play, with leading roles played by some of the same protagonists – President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, for example, who says he still thinks attacking Iraq was a good idea. Co-starring is Secretary of...

read more

The Nakba Demands Justice

This May 15th, Palestinians commemorated seventy-one years of diaspora due to the founding of the state of Israel. Over 400 villages, towns and urban centers of Mandate Palestine were ethnically cleansed of their inhabitants. In that fateful May of 1948, some 750,000...

read more

Bolton in Wonderland

Only 70 days into his presidency, Ronald Reagan faced an assassination attempt. While he was in surgery and the vice president was mid-flight over Texas, Secretary of State Alexander Haig famously declared in front of the press, “As of now, I am in control here, in...

read more

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Back in 2012, I stumbled across figures on the U.S. government’s classification of documents and was stunned. In 2011, 92,064,862 of them had been sequestered and 26,058,678 of those given “top secret” status. (Who...

read more