Republican Congressman Walter B. Jones (famed for insisting that the Congressional cafeteria re-label French fries as "freedom fries" on its menu), a man who represents North Carolina's 3rd Congressional District, home to the Marine's Camp LeJeune, voted...
Smoking Signposts to Nowhere
Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of...
The Actually Existing Occupation
[Note: I couldn't resist interrupting my "Best of TomDispatch" series there are still two to go to bring you the latest Jonathan Schell "Letter from Ground Zero" columns from the upcoming issue of the Nation magazine, whose editors have been kind enough,...
The Scalping Party
It didn't take long for the war crimes to begin in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo, in Iraq. By November 2003, Mike Davis was writing about them for TomDispatch. And in introducing his piece, "The Scalping Party," I suggested that the seeds of our future were...
The Scourge of Militarism: Rome and America
In September 2003, only four months after our president's "Mission Accomplished" moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of...
Rummy Rules
In my non-Tomdispatch life as a book editor, I used to have a modest dream. Every season, editors like me send the galleys of books they're publishing off, en masse, to likely blurbees, who will, if all goes well, reach for their thesauruses, gather their adjectives...
Bases, Bases Everywhere
The last few weeks have been base-heavy ones in the news. The Pentagon's provisional Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the first in a decade, was published to domestic screams of pain. It represents, according to the Washington Post, "a sweeping plan to close...
Crossing Nuclear Thresholds
Call it Star Wars, parts VII-XXII; but last week, just as Revenge of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide multiplexes on Tatooine alone were expected to pull in billions reporter Tim Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York Times that a new...
The Return of the Body Count
On March 19, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the "metrics" of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Here is part of that interview: "NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said...
An Iraq Correspondent Comes Home
Dahr Jamail, an independent reporter from Alaska, covered our occupation of Iraq for much of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 before coming home early this year. As a "unilateral," he was a distinctly atypical figure in Baghdad. Unlike reporters for major papers, wire...


