Drone Warfare

By Tom Englehart | ( Tomdispatch.com) Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy. It involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come closer […]

Barack Obama

Top 5 Ways Obama’s ‘All of the Above’ Politics led to Sanders & Trump

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole – (Informed Comment) – It is said that one of the things President Obama wanted to talk to comedian Jon Stewart about was his occasional cynicism. “Obama scolded him for turning young Americans cynical.” But the approach to politics taken by Obama until recently — of promising genuine change but governing as […]

Bill of Rights

Revealed: The private firms tracking terror targets at heart of US drone wars

contributors

By Abigail Fielding-Smith and Crofton Black | (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism) | – – The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private sector contractors in the heart of its drone operations to analyse top secret video feeds and help track high value terror targets, an investigation has found. Contracts unearthed by the Bureau […]

Drone Warfare

Requiem for the Home Front: Before War was Covert & Elite

Tom Engelhardt

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 […]

Central Intelligence Agency

The Unbearable Heaviness of the Drone Cowboy

contributors

By Pratap Chatterjee | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – The myth of the lone drone warrior is now well established and threatens to become as enduring as that of the lone lawman with a white horse and a silver bullet who rode out into the Wild West to find the bad guys. In a similar fashion, […]

Drone Warfare

The Ghost of Soviet Collapse haunts the West: Military Hegemony isn’t what it Used to Be

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – The rise and fall of great powers and their imperial domains has been a central fact of history for centuries. It’s been a sensible, repeatedly validated framework for thinking about the fate of the planet. So it’s hardly surprising, when faced with a country once regularly labeled […]

Drone Warfare

The True Cost of America’s Ongoing Wars: Sebastian Junger, Spencer Ackerman et al.

contributors

Michael Moynihan, “The Business of Life” | VICE News Video | — “The AUMF (The “Authorization of the Use of Military Force”) was a bill passed in the immediate wake of 9/11 and authorized the President of the United States to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those who had aided the terrorists responsible […]

Bill of Rights

Does Sen. Lindsey Graham want to Drone Americans for Thought Crimes?

contributors

John Iadarola & Jimmy Dore | (The Young Turks) | – “”Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is ready to join the crowded 2016 presidential race — and he’s having a blast in doing it. The defense hawk and pragmatic Republican said Monday morning on CBS’s This Morning that he would make an announcement on June 1 […]

Barack Obama

“Bug Splat”: Body Counts, Drones, and “Collateral Damage”

Tom Engelhardt

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 […]