Originally posted at TomDispatch. If I had to pick a single moment when I grasped that we were on a new surveillance planet, it would have been the release of the stunning revelations of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in exile in...
Why Can’t We Just Play Ball?
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I can remember lying on my bed with a crumpled up piece of paper in my hand and throwing it at the wall while, in my mind, the announcer’s voice carried on: "It’s a long drive to right field... Furillo is going back, back,...
America’s (Near) Thirty Years’ War
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing about that war in...
The Legacy of Infinite War
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It looks like TomDispatch may have a few less readers from now on. Perhaps it will surprise you, but judging by the mail I get, some members of the U.S. military do read TomDispatch – partially to check out the range of military and...
American Islamophobia’s Fake Facts
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Anti-Muslim activists in the United States were operating in a "post-truth era" and putting out "alternative facts" long before those phrases entered the language. For the last decade they have been spreading provable falsehoods...
Trump’s Grand Strategy
Originally posted at TomDispatch. If you don’t happen to be part of Donald Trump’s base and you’re a member of the “fake media,” it’s a commonplace to assume that our president is a creature of impulse, a giant id with hardly rhyme,...
Making Sense of US Moves in the Middle East
Originally posted at TomDispatch. [Editor's note: The Jewish Nation-State bill described here was passed early Thursday morning. This article was written before passage.] The report was devastating – or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. "Between 2001 and...
Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Give them credit. As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse has so vividly reported over the last decade, America’s previously “elite” Special Operations forces -- once small, specially trained units in a large military --...
Weaponized Keynesianism in Washington
Who could forget it? There were the $37 screws (no need to say who was getting screwed), the $2,043 nut (McDonnell Douglas made it specially for the U.S. Navy), the $7,622 coffee pot, the $74,165 aluminum ladder, and the $640 plastic toilet seats for the Air Force....
How America’s Wars Fund Inequality at Home
Originally posted at TomDispatch. On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump wasn’t shy when it came to the issue of debt. As he told Norah O’Donnell of CBS This Morning at the time, “I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody...


