National Security State

By David Ruiz | (Electronic Frontier Foundation) | – – The debate over how to reauthorize certain NSA surveillance authorities has seen a whirlwind of activity, culminating in the major news that the House Rules Committee postponed a vote today to potentially expand NSA spying powers. As we wrote yesterday: “According to reports published Tuesday […]

Donald Trump

Global Spec Ops in Trump’s Pentagon: Elite Commandos in record 149 Countries

Juan Cole

By Nick Turse | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – “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. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces […]

Donald Trump

The Falsehood of Trump’s ‘Precision Strikes’ and ‘Clean Wars’

Juan Cole

By Paul Rogers | ( OpenDemocracy.net) | – – Trump’s worldview promises low-cost military success. The blasting apart of civilian lives in Iraq says otherwise. Many previous columns in this series focus on the transition in the western way of war since 9/11 from tens of thousands of “boots on the ground” to “remote warfare”. […]

National Security State

Can we turn military spending into a budget for the people?

contributors

By Frida Berrigan | ( Waging Nonviolence) | – – Connecticut is the only state in the union that does not have a budget, and the state’s bills are being paid in emergency supplementals — or going past due. The state is budget-less, so my town of New London — one of its smaller urban […]

al-Qaeda

Is Bin Laden Shaping America more than our Founding Fathers?

Juan Cole

By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald […]

CIA

JFK Files Reveal US Mulled Use of Biological Weapons in Cuba

contributors

TeleSur | – – During a top-level meeting, U.S. officials warned against the possibility of it being traced back to the United States. The recently published JFK files have shed further light on U.S. plans to use biological weapons as part of its Cuban Project, an agricultural sabotage plot against the socialist country. During a […]

Donald Trump

U.S. Soldiers Died in Niger. What on Earth Are We Doing There?

contributors

By Peter Certo | ( Otherwords.org) | – – When our soldiers kill and die in wars we don’t know about and can’t end, we’re not a democracy anymore. In our military-revering culture, it’s a strange thing for a president to start a war of words with the grieving families of slain soldiers. Strange, yes. […]

Donald Trump

Trump’s Dreams of Nukes and our Long National Nightmare

Rebecca Gordon

San Francisco (Tomdispatch.com) | Preventing a nuclear war between the United States and North Korea may be the most pressing challenge facing the world right now. Our childish, ignorant, and incompetent president is shoving all of us — especially the people of Asia — ever nearer to catastrophe. While North Korea probably hasn’t yet developed […]

Africa

Sen. Lindsey Graham surprised at US Troops in Niger? He could have read Nick Turse

Juan Cole

By Jon Queally, staff writer. | ( Commondreams.org) ” – – Graham Should Read More Nick Turse, TomDispatch, and Common Dreams. What U.S. Senators Don’t Know (and Neither Do You) About What the Pentagon Is Doing in Africa Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the Senate’s most outspoken military hawks and member of the powerful […]