National Security State

By Matthew Harwood via Tomdispatch.com Jason Westcott was afraid. One night last fall, he discovered via Facebook that a friend of a friend was planning with some co-conspirators to break in to his home. They were intent on stealing Wescott’s handgun and a couple of TV sets. According to the Facebook message, the suspect was […]

Hiroshima Taught us that the “National Security State” isn’t about Security for us (Noam Chomsky)

contributors

By Noam Chomsky via Tomdispatch.com If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be […]

Barack Obama

Obama steps up to call Bush-era CIA Torture “Torture,” Despite Legal Implications

contributors

CNN points out that President Obama’s forthright condemnation of Bush administration-era CIA torture could cause legal problems for Agency employees, and that the Congressional report he was talking about avoided that diction. Obama doesn’t very often any more speak his mind, but in this case he clearly felt strongly enough about the betrayal of constitutional […]

Barack Obama

Real-Life House of Cards: DOJ says President is Judge Jury & Executioner

contributors

By Peter Van Buren via Tomdispatch.com You can’t get more serious about protecting the people from their government than the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, specifically in its most critical clause: “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In 2011, the White House ordered the drone-killing of American citizen […]

Immigration

Border Wars in the Homeland “Stop Stepping on the Pictures”

contributors

By Todd Miller Shena Gutierrez was already cuffed and in an inspection room in Nogales, Arizona, when the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent grabbed her purse, opened it, and dumped its contents onto the floor right in front of her. There couldn’t be a sharper image of the Bill of Rights rollback we are […]

Economy

What the West means by “stability” in the Middle East

contributors

By Victor Argo “For them, a stable country is a country with a strong government favorable to the United States”: When Western governments pompously talk about “stability in the Middle East”, the interest and the security of the people of the region are seldom on their minds, writes Victor Argo. Stability, stability, stability. Comments on […]

Bill of Rights

Helpless Giant: How Imperial US Elites Tied America Down All by Themselves

Tom Engelhardt

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 […]