National Security State

By Tom Engelhardt and Laura Poitras via Tomdispatch.com Here’s a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! stat from our new age of national security. How many Americans have security clearances? The answer: 5.1 million, a figure that reflects the explosive growth of the national security state in the post-9/11 era. Imagine the kind of system needed […]

Barack Obama

Is Obama worse than Nixon on Harassing Journalists? Committee to Protect Journalists Petition

contributors

Electronic Frontier Foundation p>A free press has always been an essential part of any democracy. That’s why repressive governments insist on state control over media. That’s why the very first addition to the Constitution, the First Amendment, protects freedom of speech. And that’s why EFF is joining over 60 organizations supporting the Committee to Protect […]

National Security State

The Terrorists have our Number, and do a Number on Washington

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com [Note for TomDispatch Readers: I want to offer special thanks to those of you who made $100 donations to this website in return for signed, personalized copies of my new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. What a great crew you are! Believe me, […]

Central Intelligence Agency

Failure Is Success: How American Intelligence Works in the Twenty-First Century

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt [Note for TomDispatch Readers: My new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), is now available everywhere. If you’ve been a TomDispatch obsessive all these years, it’s your job to make it a success. I’m counting on you! […]

Barack Obama

Drone Strikes as much an Obama Legacy as Health Care: John Oliver

contributors

John Oliver “The United States has launched a huge number of drone strikes under President Obama. It’s widely accepted and extremely terrifying” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Drones (HBO)

African-Americans

Right Wing on Holder: al-Qaeda, Black Panther, Stalinist

Juan Cole

MediaMatters4America: mediamatters4america: The Worst Right-Wing Smears About Eric Holder

Barack Obama

Apocalypse Now, Iraq Edition

contributors

By Peter Van Buren via Tomdispatch.com I wanted to offer a wry chuckle before we headed into the heavy stuff about Iraq, so I tried to start this article with a suitably ironic formulation. You know, a déjà-vu-all-over-again kinda thing. I even thought about telling you how, in 2011, I contacted a noted author to […]

Barack Obama

‘We’re on edge of large war in MidEast’ – Daniel Ellsberg

contributors

RT: “With Washington wading into another war in the Middle East, one iconic US whistleblower says Americans are being kept in the dark about the risks of the latest intervention. And he called for more people to spill the beans, as RT’s Ameera David reports.” ‘We’re on edge of large war in MidEast’ – Daniel […]

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Gulliver and the Lilliputians: It’s America’s Small Wars that are Unwinnable

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt It’s possible I’ve lived most of my life on the wrong planet — and if that sounds like the first sentence of a sci-fi novel maybe, in its own way, it is. I thought I knew where I was, of course, but looking back from our helter-skelter world of 2014, I wonder. […]