Who can keep up? The revelations – mainly thanks to the documents Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency – are never-ending. Just this week, we learned that GCHQ, the British intelligence agency whose activities are interwoven with the NSA’s, used...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. There is, it seems, something new under the sun. Geopolitically speaking, when it comes to war and the imperial principle, we may be in uncharted territory. Take a look around and you’ll see a world at the boiling point. From Ukraine...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Think of us as having two presidents. One, a fellow named Barack Obama, cuts a distinctly Clark Kent-ish figure. In presiding over domestic policy, he is regularly thwarted in his desires by the Republicans in Congress and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Here, at least, is a place to start: intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June. Brace...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Call me human. It turns out that I’m no better at predicting the future than the rest of humanity. If as a species we were any good at it, right now I would undoubtedly be zipping through the gloriously spired skies over my...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Imagine this: a president and his top officials as self-professed assassins – and proud of it, even attempting to gain political capital from it. It’s not that American presidents have never been associated with assassination attempts...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Last year, Secretary of State John Kerry condemned Russia’s pledge to sell advanced antiaircraft weapons to Syria, noting that it would have "a profoundly negative impact on the balance of interests and the stability of the...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. The question Senator Ron Wyden asked on March 12th of last year was straightforward enough and no surprise for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. He had been given it a day in advance of his testimony before the Senate...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. You want ominous? Then offer a deep bow to conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a man eager to turn the Japanese military into an ever less defensive force, fully breach his country’s “peace constitution,” and...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was 1949. My mother – known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist” – was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the...
