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Tom Dispatch
I’m in my mid-thirties, which means that, after the 9/11 attacks, when this country went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in what President George W. Bush called the “Global War on Terror,” I was still in college...
If you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars?
The new U.S. energy policy of the Trump era is, in some ways, the oldest energy policy on Earth...
2017 was a year of investigations for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM)...
In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump warned grimly of “rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy, and our values...”
Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countriesor renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is...
There’s been lots of fire and fury around Washington lately, including a brief government shutdown...
The present arrives out of a past that we are too quick to forget, misremember, or enshroud in myth...
Vietnam: it’s always there. Looming in the past, informing American futures...
Recently, a memory of my son as a small boy came back to me...
In the past couple of weeks, thanks to the president’s racist comments about Haiti and African countries he can’t even name -- remember “Nambia”? -- as well as the stamp of approval he awarded future immigrants from Norway, we’ve seen a surprising amount of commentary about that fortunate...
A little over a year ago at TomDispatch I wrote about the bloody nightmaresrupturing my sleep and the night terrors gripping my little household in the wake of Donald Trump’s election...
As 2017 ended with billionaires toasting their tax cuts and energy executives cheering their unfettered access to federal lands as well as coastal waters, there was one sector of the American elite that did not share in the champagne celebration: Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts......
As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office...
At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace...
As a mother and an activist, here’s what I’ve concluded as 2018 begins: it’s getting harder and harder to think about the future -- at least in that soaring Whitney Houston fashion...
He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, “shrouded in secrecy,” flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan...
Let’s start with the universe and work our way in...
I remember the day President Obama let me down...
“I’ve just heard that my family home near Carpenteria is literally in flames at this moment,” a friend told me recently...
“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October...
First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein: the screenwriter and film director James Toback...
When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees...
He was a rich businessman, an outspoken outsider with a love of conspiracy theories...
We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn...
Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class...
You’ve heard the platitude that hindsight is 20/20...
He received a prestigious award from the West Point Association of Graduates...
Maybe you thought America’s nuclear arsenal, with its thousands of city-busting, potentially civilization-destroying thermonuclear warheads, was plenty big enough to deter any imaginable adversary from attacking the U.S. with nukes of their own...
Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war...
After nine months of confusion, chaos, and cascading tweets, Donald Trump’s White House has finally made one thing crystal clear: the U.S. is staying in Afghanistan to fight and -- so they insist -- win...
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t just stay up north...
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn’t exactly come across as the guy you’d want in your corner in a playground tussle...
On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate...
By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars...
Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consignedto the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks...
Preventing a nuclear war between the United States and North Korea may be the most pressing challenge facing the world right now...
When the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published his bestseller The Disuniting of America in 1991, he didn’t seriously entertain the worst-case scenario suggested by the title...
In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty...
Millions of football fans must have felt grateful to President Trump for provoking the entire National Football League into a goal line stand last month...
It took 14 years, but now we have an answer...
Eight years ago, when I wrote a book on the first days of Guantanamo, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, I assumed that Gitmo would prove a grim anomaly in our history...
“This... thing, [the War on Drugs] this ain't police work... I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors...
Here’s a question for you: How do you spell boondoggle?
Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.
