By Tom Engelhardt (Tomdispatch.com) It was the end of the road for Chuck Hagel last week and the Washington press corps couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about writing his obituary. In terms of pure coverage, it may not have been Ferguson or the seven-foot deluge of snow that hit Buffalo, New York, but the avalanche […]
Helpless Giant: How Imperial US Elites Tied America Down All by Themselves
By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does — torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in […]
Tomgram: Engelhardt, War as the President’s Private Preserve
When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble — dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock…
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Arrival of the Warrior Corporation
In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missile…
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Kicking Down the World’s Door
Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning…
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Iran Through the Looking Glass
Reverse the story, though, and it immediately becomes a malign, if unimaginable, fairy tale. Of course, no Iranian elite forces will ever operate along the U.S. border…
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Superpower Adrift in an Alien World
Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC…
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Lessons from Lost Wars in 2012
It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact. It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana. It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way. And then, of course, it wasn’t. And t…
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Restless Planet
On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended …