Jeremy Scahill’s new book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, is sort of like approaching a dark cavity in an old tree. How many of us would instinctively cry out, “I don’t want to look – there will be creepy crawly things in there and I’m better off not...
Drones, Sanctions and the Prison Industrial Complex
Editor's note: Brian Terrell was arrested in April of last year for protesting drone warfare at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and wrote the following from Yankton Federal Prison Camp, where he is nearing the end of a six month sentence. In the final weeks of a...
Roaches, Mosquitoes, and Birds: The Coming Micro-Drone Revolution
“[Drones are a] game-changing technology, akin to gunpowder, the steam engine, the atomic bomb—opening up possibilities that were fiction a generation earlier but also opening up perils that were unknown a generation ago.”—Peter Singer, senior...
Rand’s Stand
Last week, something exciting happened in U.S. politics. It was exciting in itself, and even if nothing else had come of it, it still would have been exciting. But what made it even more exciting is what followed – the reaction to this event that various people at...
Who Speaks Now for the GOP?
Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to declare a filibuster and pledge he would not sit down until either he could speak no longer or got an answer to his question about Barack Obama's war powers. Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the...
Congress, Drones, and The Imperial Presidency
Last week the US Senate took a break from debating the phony cuts known as “sequestration,” for Senator Rand Paul to hold a 13-hour filibuster to force the Obama administration to state whether it believes the President has the right to kill American citizens with...
Rand Paul’s Message to Obama: Don’t Drone Me Bro
The most positive outcome of Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster – which ended when Paul was forced to take a bathroom break – was giving the American public a sense of the treacherous path that President Obama’s drone program could take, i.e. the targeted killing of...
#StandwithRand
I started writing this as Rand Paul entered the 9th hour of his historic filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, but I had to stop. As I listened and watched, real tears clouded my vision, raining down on the keyboard – tears of pure joy....
The Drone Threat
Last week, Senators threatened to put a “hold” on the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director over his refusal to answer questions about the use of drones to kill Americans on US soil. That the president’s nominee to head the agency that has used drones to kill...
A Conspiracy of Stupidity
You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American...