By Nan Levinson | – (Tomdispatch.com) – Bizarrely enough, the spate of phone calls from recruiters began a couple of years ago. The first ones came from the Army, next the Marines, and then other branches of the military. I’m decades past enlistment age. I’ve been publicly antiwar for most of that time and come […]
Trump Spending $1.2 Trillion a year on War, with Nothing to Show for It
By Mandy Smithberger | – Hold on to your helmets! It’s true the White House is reporting that its proposed new Pentagon budget is only $740.5 billion, a relatively small increase from the previous year’s staggering number. In reality, however, when you also include war and security costs buried in the budgets of other agencies, […]
“We’ve Been Attacked!” Women and Trauma in the Trump-Putin Era
By Andrea Mazzarino | – ( Tomdisptach.com) – Last month, as hundreds of thousands of people showed up for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., a few miles from my home, I was at a karate dojo testing for my first belt. My fellow practitioners, ranging in age from five into their seventies, looked on […]
Coach Trump: The Superbowl Presidency of Old White Men
By Robert Lipsyte< | - ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Attorney General William Barr’s campaign to expand the powers of the presidency to unprecedented imperial levels has been misinterpreted as an attempt to raise Donald Trump to the level of his strongman heroes like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Jair Bolsonaro. Fake news! It’s really been […]
Why the Pentagon never Wins Wars any More but Needs Bigger and Bigger nearly trillion-dollar Budgets
By Mandy Smithberger | – (Tomdispatch.com) – Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the […]
Indelible Legacy: Or How This Became a Gitmo World
Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua Dratel | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – In January 2002, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility in Cuba opened its gates for the first 20 detainees of the war on terror. Within 100 days, 300 of them would arrive, often hooded and in those infamous orange jumpsuits, and that would just […]
How the President Became a Drone Bomber: From Obama to Trump, from Afghanistani to Soleimani
By Allegra Harpootlian | – (Tomdispatch.com) – We’re only a few days into the new decade and it’s somehow already a bigger dumpster fire than the last. On January 2nd, President Trump decided to order what one expert called “the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched.” This one took out not some nameless […]
Is the ‘War on Terror’ actually a War on Education and the Young?
By Andrea Mazzarino | – (Tomdispatch.com) – One day in October 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, I stood at the front of a private high school classroom. As a new social studies teacher, I had been tasked with describing violence against women in that country. I showed the students an article from the […]
Military Spouses and the True Costs of our Forever Wars
By Andrea Mazzarino | – (Tomdispatch.com) – There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort […]