Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World
Crossposted from TomDispatchI was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, ...
The 0% Doctrine: Obama Breaks New Ground When It Comes to War With Iran
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was: ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchIn the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles. When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchMake no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning. Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut nuclear arsenal. Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint ...
Iranian Aircraft Carriers in the Gulf of Mexico
Crossposted from TomDispatch Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S. (Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as ...
Obama's Mission Accomplished Moment?
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC. Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact. It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana. It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way. And then, of course, it wasn’t. And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta). ...
The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
Crossposted from TomDispatchOn the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words ...
How to Turn Election Year Into Election Life
Crossposted from TomDispatchSometimes words outlive their usefulness. Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us. “Election,” “presidential election campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for name-change. I ...
Crossposted from TomdispatchHe was 22, a corporal in the Marines from Preston, Iowa, a “city” incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949. He died in a hospital in Germany of “wounds received from an explosive device while on patrol in Helmand province [Afghanistan].” Of him, his high school ...
Crossposted from TomdispatchEvery childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face ...
Crossposted from TomdispatchHow about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream? M.R.I.C. (May it rest in carnage.) No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchOnce the Arab Spring broke loose, people began asking me why this country was still so quiet. I would always point out that no one ever expects or predicts such events. Nothing like this, I would say, happens until it happens, and only then do you try to ...
Is the National Security Complex Too Big to Fail?
Crossposted from TomdispatchThink of Iraq as the AIG of wars -- the only difference being that the bailout there didn’t involve just three payouts. More than eight years after the Bush administration invaded that country, the bailout is, unbelievably enough, still going. Even as the U.S. military withdraws, the State ...
Crossposted from Tomdispatch[Note to Readers: Who hasn’t received one -- or 100 -- of those “Nigerian” letters offering you, in florid prose, millions of potential dollars and with nary a catch in sight? But who knew that the highest officials in Washington have been receiving them as well -- and ...
Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death?
Crossposted from TomdispatchPut what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular paragraph should also have sent chills through the body politic, launched warning flares, and left the people’s representatives in Congress shouting about something other than ...
Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchGeorge W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from ...
The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt’s already gone, having barely outlasted its moment -- just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added up to much. Okay, it was a little more than the military wanted, something less than Joe Biden would have liked, not enough for the ...
Nine War Words That Define Our World
Crossposted from TomDispatchNow that Washington has at least six wars cooking (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and more generally, the global war on terror), Americans find themselves in a new world of war. If, however, you haven't joined the all-volunteer military, any of our 17 intelligence outfits, the Pentagon, ...
Here’s a scenario to chill you to the bone: Without warning, the network -- a set of terrorist super cells -- struck in northern Germany and Germans began to fall by the hundreds, then thousands. As panic spread, hospitals were overwhelmed with the severely wounded. More than 20 of the ...
Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. ...
Bored to Death in Afghanistan (and Washington)
One day in October 2001, a pilot for Northwest Airlines refused to let Arshad Chowdhury, a 25-year-old American Muslim (“with a dark complexion”) who had once worked as an investment banker in the World Trade Center, board his plane at San Francisco National Airport. According to Northwest’s gate agents, Chowdhury writes ...
Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy
Back in the 1960s, Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam War: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it’s a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its tenth year. ...
Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy, oil-ish wars in the Greater Middle East that just don’t seem to pan out? Count on one thing: part of the U.S. military feels just the way you do, especially a largely sidelined Navy -- and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why, ...
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May 7th, 2013
And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth
It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central ...
April 24th, 2013
Filling the Empty Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had ...
April 14th, 2013
The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: ...
April 2nd, 2013
American Anniversaries from Hell: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Crossposted from TomDispatch It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, ...
March 10th, 2013
Where Is Everybody?: Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change
Crossposted from TomDispatch Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and ...
February 12th, 2013
Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve
Crossposted from TomDispatch You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you ...
February 7th, 2013
Crossposted from TomDispatch Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for ...
June 30th, 2011
The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt’s already gone, having barely outlasted its moment -- just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added ...
July 12th, 2011
Crossposted from TomDispatchGeorge W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a ...
February 7th, 2013
Crossposted from TomDispatch Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for ...
May 7th, 2013
And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth
It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central ...
May 31st, 2011
Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen ...
August 3rd, 2011
Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. ...
August 11th, 2011
Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death?
Crossposted from TomdispatchPut what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular ...
'Dirty Wars' by Jeremy Scahill
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
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Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow Show, 2/27/12
