By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – Almost three quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I’m speaking […]
Our Jihadis and Theirs: The Real (Armed) Dangers of American Life
By Tom Engeldhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – Consider this paragraph a holding action on the subject of getting blown away in America. While I write this dispatch, I’m waiting patiently for the next set of dispiriting killings in this country. And I have faith. Before I’m done, some angry — or simply mentally disturbed […]
The National Security State gets Real: 9 Ways the US is becoming Bizarro World
By Tomd Engledhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – It’s commonplace to speak of “the fog of war,” of what can’t be known in the midst of battle, of the inability of both generals and foot soldiers to foresee developments once fighting is underway. And yet that fog is nothing compared to the murky nature of the […]
“Bug Splat”: Body Counts, Drones, and “Collateral Damage”
Tom Englehardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – The Obama administration has adamantly refused to count. Not a body. In fact, for a long time, American officials associated with Washington’s drone assassination campaigns and “signature strikes” in the backlands of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen claimed that there were no bodies to count, that the CIA’s drones were […]
Not your Founding Fathers’ America: Permanent War, Permanent Election Campaigns, Guns, Drones and Surveillance
By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) I never fail to be amazed — and that’s undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the west? Maybe not. The occasion for […]
Why SecDef Hagel is Really Out: As usual, the War Party Won
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…
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