Oliver Stone’s series of interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin – conducted between July 2015 and February 2017 – has garnered a lot of attention, albeit in most cases not for the right reasons. In a much-noted appearance of Stephen Colbert’s comedy show, the...
A Wide World of Winless War
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If you want a number, try 194. That’s how many countries there are on planet Earth (give or take one or two). Today, Nick Turse reports a related number that should boggle your mind: at least 137 of those countries, or 70% of them,...
Civilians Flee Mosul War Zone; 59 Killed in Iraq
Many Casualties in Mosul Attacks; 151 Killed in Iraq
When the Detainee Is American…
The corpses pile up like sandbags along the planet’s geopolitical borders. “Perhaps his condition deteriorated and the authorities decided it was better to release him in a coma than as a corpse.” So said an expert on North Korea recently, quoted in the New York Times...
Peace Is a Four-Letter Word
When a Briton or American speaks about a "four-letter word", he means a vulgar sexual term, a word not to be mentioned in polite society. In Israel we also have such a word, a word of four letters. A word not to mention. This word is "Shalom",...
The Criminal ‘Laws’ of Counterinsurgency
Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled The CIA As Organized Crime. (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program,...
Our President’s Word Wars
These days I find myself thinking often about a cartoon by the late Theodore Geissel. In it, a woman with a sweater that reads “America First” reads aloud from a storybook to two children: “And the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their...
A Brief Missive
I’m involved in a time-consuming research project, the results of which will show up in this space sometime next week, and so there’s no column today. But I’ll be back on Monday. In the meantime, I want to give you something to read that you might find illuminating,...


